Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Every gun, tinker made or otherwise, was pointed at my teammates.

  Another gun pressed against the back of my head. Soldiers had teleported in behind me.

  I felt despair sweep through me. No. Too many. Didn’t think he could teleport this many in.

  The gun barrel prodded me, and I stood. I walked with the gun pressed between my shoulderblades, just above the spot where my utility compartment hung.

  “Skitter. How nice of you to join us.”

  “Cut the fake civility,” I said. ”Where are our teammates?”

  “Regent and Tattletale are safe and locked up, rest assured. I must say, I’m quite disappointed. I really had hoped this would work out, and the loss of the Undersiders sets me back by weeks or months in the grand scheme of my plan. Imp, you can cease trying to run. My men have cameras on you,” Calvert gestured toward the laptop.

  Imp moved her mask to spit on the ground, just to my right. It was a bit of a shock to find her standing there.

  “Farewell, Under-”

  “Wait.” I said. Raising my voice made me cough.

  “I don’t see any point to waiting.”

  I hurried to recover and speak before he could give the order. ”Dead man’s switch.”

  Calvert sighed. ”Ah. You are irritating, you know? On more than one occasion, I know, you’ve argued for the sake of the greater good. I’ve viewed the recordings the PRT has of your appearances at major events and I’ve come to know you fairly well. It’s rather hypocritical that you’re now working so hard to fight against the greater good.”

  “Against your rule.”

  “Essentially so. If you simply would have died quietly, the Undersiders wouldn’t have been stirred to rebellion, I could have established a peace we haven’t seen since the day Scion arrived and everyone involved here could have walked away happier and healthier. Your friends included.”

  “Tattletale excepted,” I responded.

  “Tattletale excepted, I admit. Too dangerous to be left unchecked. A shame. Now, you were saying?”

  “I arranged a dead man’s switch. Kind of. Unless one of my subordinates receives a message from me every twenty minutes, she’ll mass-send emails to everyone important and even a few unimportant people.”

  “Detailing the true nature of Thomas Calvert, I suspect?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hate to break it to you, dear Skitter, but this isn’t enough leverage for me to let you walk away.”

  I turned my head in the direction of my teammates. With my power, I noted their presence. Grue, Imp, Bitch, her dog.

  “None of us?” I asked.

  “No. I’m more confident in my ability to handle the chaos that any email creates than I am in my ability to get you and your teammates under my thumb again.”

  “Okay,” I said. I could feel sweat running cold down the back of my neck. ”Then I have a few questions, and a couple of requests. Satisfy that, and I can disable the dead man’s switch.”

  “The requests first, if you please.”

  “Dinah goes free when you’re done. You don’t keep her forever.”

  “Agreed.”

  “My dad, you don’t touch him.”

  “I haven’t and I won’t have reason to.”

  “And you take care of Rachel’s dogs.”

  Calvert nodded, but I could sense his patience was running out.

  “You do what you can to stop Jack from doing what he can to end the world. If you have capes at your disposal, you give them some job related to that. To stopping it.”

  “Fine. Is that it?”

  “If none of us here get to live, at least promise Tattletale gets to.”

  “Fine. That can be arranged.”

  “I’ll need to see her, to verify she’s okay. I get that you can’t prove you haven’t gone after my dad in retaliation for earlier, but you can bring her here.”

  Calvert nodded at Chariot, who pressed a button on his wrist.

  Tattletale appeared in a flash of light, arms bound behind her, legs shackled. She wore headgear that had her blindfolded and gagged. I couldn’t quite tell, but it looked like the ears were plugged too.

  “Satisfied?” Calvert asked.

  “No. It could be a body double, like you arranged for me. I’d like to confirm with her.”

  “No. The restraints are in place for a reason.”

  “Then it’s a body double,” I said. ”And I’ll let the timer run down on this damaging piece of email.”

  “I’m willing to run that risk.”

  “Use your power,” I told him. ”I’m going to say the words rose-L. She’ll reply with something green, followed by the letter A.”

  “I’m familiar with your codes.”

  “Great. And if she doesn’t, shoot us. If there’s a problem, go with your other world.”

  “You know how my power works?” Calvert sighed. ”I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised in the end, with the name she chose. No.”

  “It’s all I’m asking for. You can send your computer experts to the destination I name, they’ll check the computer memory to verify no messages were sent, check the phones of everyone on my call history that you don’t already know, and then you’ll know you’re in the clear. That’s what I’m offering you in exchange for the assurance that at least Tattletale will get to live. Peace of mind.”

  “I could kill your liaison, you realize. She’s a loose end.”

  I thought of Charlotte, hoped I wouldn’t regret getting her involved. ”I hope you won’t. All I’ve told her is that she should await my message and send the file I composed if she doesn’t hear from me regularly. I hope you’ll let Tattletale and my civilian live, but if you won’t, if you break your word, I guess I’ll have to live with you looking a little worse in the eyes of the people who work for you. Like the Travelers.”

  “Don’t bring us into this, Skitter,” Trickster said. ”This is your mess. Your consequences.”

  “I didn’t do anything. He was the one who turned on us first,” I protested.

  I sensed Trickster turn Calvert’s way.

  Calvert sighed audibly. ”As Skitter knows about my power and ever so kindly revealed the broad strokes of it to everyone in earshot, I suppose there’s no loss in explaining. I tortured one member of the Undersiders for information, in another world, days ago. They revealed that you were plotting to turn on me if I refused to release Dinah. I cannot afford to release her, so my hand was forced.”

  “So it’s our fault?” Imp asked.

  “Ultimately, yes.”

  “How did you make those body doubles? Genesis?”

  “The old-fashioned way. The one that replaced you was a Sudanese child soldier. I was preparing for the eventuality of your betrayal since the day after Leviathan attacked and your… wobbly allegiances became perfectly clear. It’s amusing, but the files you stole from the PRT offices after rejoining the Undersiders supplied much of the video footage my hired experts used to coach her in the particulars of how you move and speak. When you went to convince the Mayor of our way of thinking, Trickster carried the devices Leet designed to record the particular signals you use to command your bugs.”

  “Which is how you built the swarm box.”

  “The Famine Engine,” Leet said.

  “Whatever.”

  “Any further questions?”

  “Why didn’t you drop me on top of a bomb?”

  “An unfortunate side effect of Leet’s power. Leet believes it was the proximity to the bomb or the particular signature of the vat of acid that made it so likely to occur, but with my power I observed that it wasn’t merely a chance that the teleportation would fail and your well-trained body double would be caught instead, but a surety. No less than twelve tries with the variables changed slightly. Leet’s power sabotages him, it seems.”

  “Is that Leet’s passenger at work?”

  “Passenger? Ah, that’s what Bonesaw calls the agents. Yes, I suppose that might be the case. In
any event, we nearly ran out of time before verifying that guns, fire and alcohol wouldn’t skew his power. Whatever the cause of the errors was.”

  “Okay. So I don’t suppose you want to let me confirm it’s Tattletale and tell you who to contact to cancel the dead man’s switch?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve been careful every step of the way. Thinking five steps ahead, amassing resources, amassing top-notch underlings, getting us working for you, getting the Travelers. I’m surprised you’re willing to let things go ass-backwards when you’re so close to tying up the last loose end.”

  “It’s precisely because I’m careful that I’m not willing to let Tattletale open her mouth and speak.”

  “You’re still pretending it’s Tattletale,” I said.

  “It is. I had no reason to arrange a body double for her as I did for you.”

  “You had every reason. Like you said, you didn’t trust her, you couldn’t let her work unchecked, and it would have been too unusual if the two members of the Undersiders that posed the biggest threat to your goals happened to disappear at once.”

  Calvert shook his head and touched fingers to his forehead, as if exasperated. ”Your underling and Tattletale can live. That’s all I’m willing to offer. You’ll have to take my word on both points”

  “Your word is worth nothing,” Bitch spat the words.

  Calvert reacted as if he’d been slapped.

  “You promised me safety, security, so long as I joined this team. I’ve never been less safe, less secure. Everybody lies through their teeth. Maybe there’s a couple of them I can stand anyways, but they’re still liars, they’ve made me a liar, and you’re the worst liar of them all. It’s fitting you wear a snake on your costume.”

  “Enough,” Calvert said, “Anything more and I’ll order my men to shoot you.”

  “Shoot her and you’ll never get the info you need from me,” I said.

  “You’re a cheat, Coil!” Bitch barked.

  “I’ll have your dogs shot if you say another word,” Calvert said.

  Bitch fell silent.

  Silence reigned for long seconds. I was aware of my bugs, knew that I couldn’t have them attack without us getting shot. I knew my armor was bulletproof, Bitch’s armored jacket was the same way, but the thinner fabric, or a bullet through the lens or eyehole of a mask? There were a lot of soldiers here. Even if the suits could stop the bullets from penetrating, we could be pulverized anyways.

  I heard a wave crash against the shore, not far away. Long seconds passed.

  “If it settles the matter, then fine,” Calvert said. He signaled Chariot.

  Another Tattletale appeared. She dropped to her knees the second she materialized. She wore a similar headset and bindings.

  “Free her mouth and one ear. Be ready to gag her again the second she speaks.”

  One of his soldiers approached the kneeling Tattletale. He undid the gag and freed her ear of the plug that was held in place with wire.

  “Rose-L,” I called out.

  “Stringbean-A,” she replied. She grunted as the soldier forced the gag back into her mouth.

  “She gets to live,” I told Calvert. ”If nothing else, you guys are going to need her help to figure out how Jack Slash ends the world in twenty-three months.”

  “It’s amusing,” Calvert said, “That you keep asking me for things I was already prepared to do. You wanted me to improve the city, to restore it to a working state. Already planned. And this? Killing Tattletale was never in the cards. I intend to keep her like I do my pet. Her power will be invaluable. Rest assured, I will offer every bit of assistance I can when the end of the world approaches.”

  “I suppose it was too much to expect that you’d let her go,” I said. My heart pounded in my chest. I wasn’t exactly feeling top-notch, so simply standing was feeling like a bit of a challenge. Fighting back, acting? No. No use. ”Her name is Charlotte. She’s staying in the red brick house a block to the east of my dad’s place. She has a laptop, but she doesn’t know what I put on it.”

  “Very well. Men? Ready-”

  “-You’re not going to check?”

  “Aim…”

  “Calvert!” I said, “Coil!”

  “Fire.”

  The sound of the gunshots was deafening, debilitating when I was already missing my sense of sight, my bugs not present enough to give me a sense of the surroundings. I sensed Grue get hit, then Bentley… I took one in the stomach and folded over.

  When the smoke cleared, for lack of a better term, we were still standing. There was the sound of a few isolated scuffles in the ranks of the soldiers. My bugs moved to the ends of gun barrels and to the soldiers themselves, noting their postures and positions.

  Roughly half of the soldiers that surrounded us were holding the other half hostage. A few had managed to get shots off, but a quick feel-around with my bugs verified that nobody had been hurt enough to be knocked to the ground. Most of the bullets had gone over our heads.

  “What is this?” Calvert asked. ”Travelers-”

  “Don’t do a thing, Travelers,” Grue boomed out, in his eerie, hollow voice. ”Someone remove Tattletale’s bindings.”

  One of the soldiers approached Tattletale and began undoing the restrictive binding. She wobbled slightly as she stood, working her jaw in the absence of the gag.

  “Glad to see the stringbean plan worked out in the end,” she said. ”Those of you I haven’t been in contact with, please hear me out. I’m paying twice what Calvert is for a year’s salary, and I’m paying it all upfront. Look to the other team captains if you don’t believe me. Fish, Minor, Richards, Meck, I’ve talked to them, and they’ve agreed.”

  There was a slight shift in the tension among the soldiers. The ones at gunpoint began slowly lowering their weapons, and the ones holding them there similarly let it calm a notch.

  “Lies,” Calvert said. There was an uncharacteristic degree of emotion in his voice. ”I’ve tracked your funding. I know exactly how much money you have.”

  “Not exactly. See, I revealed this to my team, just a little while ago, but I’ve sort of been skimming.”

  “From me?”

  “A bit. Not as much as you’d think. You keep good accounts. But our targets? For sure. Like, we go rob the Brockton Bay central bank, and maybe I skip off for five minutes to go visit the CEO’s room, use his computer to get access to more funds, and shift them into a personal account. Or I keep a few of the more valuable pieces of paperwork, or I pocket something expensive during a job. Funny thing about a power like mine, it helps me figure out what I can get away with.”

  “You haven’t taken enough to pay twice what I can.”

  “You’d be surprised. And some of your assets are in a position to be picked up by yours truly. Safe deposit boxes and safes don’t mean much against me. So that’s a bit more funding of yours that I can borrow to pay these guys. A year up front, and I’m not asking them to do a single thing. Most of them, anyways. I’m just asking that they ship out of Brockton Bay or they stay on the down-low.”“I’ll pay triple,” Calvert said.

  “You can’t pay triple,” Tattletale said, stretching as the chains around her wrists and ankles were undone. ”You’ve dented your coffers too much with the city revitalization. Didn’t help that you paid such an exorbitant sum to the Dragonslayers for the information they were offering.”

  “That was your idea.”

  “Yeah,” Tattletale said. ”You were desperate enough to deal with the Dragon threat before your big show at the debate that you didn’t make too big an issue of it. Either way, you forgot the cardinal rule of employing mercenaries. They follow the person with the money.”

  “I didn’t forget,” Calvert said, “I had that in mind every step of the way. I was exceedingly careful of how much funding I provided.”

  “Okay,” Tattletale sounded almost chirpy. ”But you didn’t account for the possibility that I was picking up as much on my own as I was.�
��

  Calvert made a noise that was a borderline snarl.

  “Undersiders,” Trickster said. ”This goes no further. Call it a stalemate, but we need his assistance.”

  “Calvert’s lying, you know,” Tattletale said. ”He can maybe help you, but he can’t help Noelle. None of the plans he’s been talking about will work, and he knows they won’t work. He wants Noelle for entirely different reasons. He thinks he can get her on a leash, so he’s got firepower even if he gets rid of the supervillains working under him. A threat that only the great PRT leader Thomas Calvert can address.”

  “I’d rather see the truth of that for myself. You touch him and we kill you.”

  “You guys aren’t wearing the same kind of durable costume we are,” Tattletale said. ”If you want to make a point of it, my soldiers can gun you down.”

  “I can swap your group with mine the second the gunshots happen,” Trickster replied, unfazed. ”You don’t want to do that.”

  I tried to speak, coughed once instead. When I finally had my voice, I said, “Ballistic. Sundancer. Any other Traveler with doubts, I know you guys aren’t happy with the status quo. If you want to stop running, stop moving constantly and move to Brockton Bay permanently, we’ll have you. We need you, even.”

  A long pause stretched out, then Ballistic stepped forward.

  “Hey, man,” Trickster said. ”No.”

  “I’m done. This was a doomed quest from the start,” Ballistic said. He stopped at Grue’s side, turned around to face his teammates.

  “Sundancer?” I asked. ”You said before that you were lonely, that all of this was too intense for you. Even the stuff I’ve done, it didn’t sit right with you. I get that. Don’t you want to stop? To say goodbye to this life?”

  Trickster looked at Sundancer, “Mars.”

  She shook her head. ”No. No, Skitter. I’m staying. Don’t have another choice.”

  “Genesis?”

  She was in the form of a girl, but wore a simple mask. ”Someone’s got to stay and be a real leader to this team. No. I’m standing by Trickster.”

  “Teleport me to safety,” Calvert said. ”Escort me away, and everything I have is yours.”