Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Shadow Stalker leaped down, floated.

  Soundlessly, she landed right in front of me, remaining in the shadow state.

  “Hoping you’ve changed your mind,” I said. Hoping you’ve seen the devastation, and that it’s reached some human part of you that cares. “That you’re interested in fighting.”

  She didn’t budge, didn’t respond.

  “It also means bashing some skulls,” I said. “She been behaving, Tattletale?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Then she’s probably itching for a good fight,” I said, not breaking eye contact with Shadow Stalker. “What do you say? You want to knock a few heads? Break some jaws?”

  She shifted to her physical state. “I’m not that easy to bait.”

  I shrugged, waiting.

  “Search and rescue is garbage,” she said, sounding annoyed. “Nobody left, but there’s no place to go if I don’t want to do it, either.”

  “You could go home,” I said. “Find your family, settle down, put the crossbow away for good.”

  “Capes don’t retire,” Shadow Stalker said. “Doesn’t work. We die in battle or we lose our minds, one or the other.”

  I thought of my passenger, how it had reflexively sought out violence in the past. How others had done the same. Die in battle.

  Then I thought of Grue. Was Shadow Stalker right? Would the retirement just fail to take?

  I sighed. “So? What’s your call?”

  “I’ll come. Sure. I kind of want to see what you’ve made of yourself.”

  She had wanted to claim the credit for my becoming what I’d become. It grated, because it wasn’t entirely wrong. It wasn’t true in the sense she believed it was true, but she had given me my powers.

  “Fine,” I said.

  She cracked her knuckles. “So, who’s first?”

  “Need to talk that over with Defiant,” I said. “We can do it over the comms, for the sake of expediency.”

  “Okay,” she said. She sounded a little pleased with herself. “Whatever. I’m game.”

  “Doorway, please,” I said, to nobody in particular. “Dragonfly interior.”

  The portal opened.

  I extended a hand, inviting the group to enter.

  Lung shouldered his way past Rachel to be the first one inside. Bastard huffed out a half-bark, then growled.

  Much like Panacea had said about Bonesaw, it wasn’t about having them as allies. Having them be part of the group, it meant they weren’t on the opposing side. They weren’t wreaking havoc as neutral parties.

  That alone was good.

  But if they turned out to be destructive forces we could control…

  The half-thought I’d had during my goodbye to Panacea fell into place.

  A plan.

  I stepped through the portal to board the Dragonfly.

  ■

  “You lunatic!” Shadow growled the word.

  I was silent. The clouds above and landscape below were a blur, the individual details impossible to make out with our speed.

  “Doing this with me? With Lung? I could almost understand that,” Shadow Stalker growled. “But your friends?”

  “Don’t care,” Tattletale said. “We’ve always been the sort to go for the long odds. You have to do what your enemy won’t predict.”

  “Damn straight,” Imp said. “Credo I live by.”

  “Mount Olympus, now credo?” Tattletale asked. “It’s the Heartbroken, isn’t it? They’re warping you into… this.”

  “Leave me alone, seriously.”

  “What you’re saying doesn’t make sense!” Shadow Stalker snarled. “Not here, not like this!“

  “It actually makes the most sense,” Tattletale said. “But that’s a different story altogether. One that needs some explanation.”

  “Ten minutes before we hit our target,” I said. We’d taken the path through the Brockton Bay portal. Cauldron’s doorways weren’t big enough for a vehicle like this.

  “Ten minutes should be enough,” Tattletale said. “Let me get this loaded on the laptop. Easier to show than tell.”

  “Right,” I said. My eyes didn’t leave the navigation screens.

  “I’ll kill you,” Shadow Stalker threatened. “Turn this fucking ship around.”

  She moved, reaching for a crossbow bolt. I reacted, half-rising from my seat, drawing my swarm out-

  But Lung moved faster, shoving Shadow Stalker against the side of the ship.

  Shadow Stalker went ghostly, brandishing the bolt like a dagger as she passed through Lung.

  Rachel gripped a length of wire that extended from the laptop, holding it out like a garrotte. As Lung had done, she moved to pin Shadow Stalker against the wall of the Dragonfly. Shadow Stalker returned to a normal state just in time to avoid being electrocuted.

  Bastard growled, snapping at her hand, and the bolt clattered to the floor.

  “You’re okay with this?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Lung rumbled, by way of response. “This might be best.”

  “Fuck you, Hebert! Pulling this shit only after you got me on board? You’re all lunatics!”

  I sighed.

  Tattletale sat down on the arm of my pilot’s seat, setting one foot down beside my thigh on the seat’s edge. “There’s stuff you need to know. I told you before, you said you wanted to be blissfully ignorant until the last minute.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yes. Right. I’m listening.”

  “It’s video footage Glaistig Uaine left with me. Last two minutes of Eidolon’s life. Video cuts in and out, but there’s audio. That leaves me maybe a minute or two to explain, then you can use the rest of the time to think it over.”

  She had my attention, though I couldn’t take my eyes off the monitors at the front of the ship. Shadow Stalker’s cries of anger were background noise.

  The Pendragon was flying alongside us, just a little behind, carrying the capes Defiant had recruited. Carrying Saint, Canary, and others.

  Tattletale loaded up the video, filling the screen of the laptop.

  I glanced once at the main monitor, then set the autopilot.

  Faultline had talked about taking the simple route. Talking to Scion. In practice, harder than it seemed.

  We were dealing with problems on a massive scale, we needed solutions on that same level. There was no easy way to get to that level. It meant taking risks. Gambling.

  We needed a destructive force we could direct. Needed to turn third-party liabilities into assets.

  With that in mind, I’d set course straight for the Simurgh. We’d talk to her or we’d kill her.

  Tattletale started the video, and I watched.

  28.04

  “We’re here,” I said.

  It was enough. All the different personalities in the Dragonfly, the… how had Tattletale put it, once upon a time? The people who weren’t inclined to play ‘cops and robbers’, who weren’t the types to follow the rules or codes, and were dangerous without a firm hand. Rachel, Lung, Sophia… they fell silent. The fighting stopped.

  Because they, even with their unique and personal issues, acknowledged that this wasn’t a situation where you fucked around.

  Monitors switched settings without any cue from me. Showing the Simurgh from a distance away, from a different angle. Defiant had switched on his long-ranged cameras.

  A moment later, he switched on the cameras in the Dragonfly. The two sets of images alternated across the innumerable displays in the craft. Only the display directly in front of me in the cockpit remained untouched, showing altitude, heading, speed, distance from target, and alerts regarding Scion’s latest appearances.

  The Dragonfly changed course, angling to maintain a set distance from the Endbringer. Again, not me.

  Defiant seemed content to handle the mechanical end of things. I stood from my seat, stretching a little, before gathering my bugs. Two relay bugs, for safety’s sake. They exited the craft.

  No scream from the Simurgh. At
least, not one I could detect. It would fit her to keep it beyond our notice, influencing us, the sort of card she would keep up her sleeve. To make the psychic scream ‘audible’, for lack of a better word, purely for spreading fear, then use it subtly at a time when she wasn’t attacking.

  The others in the ship hadn’t only gone silent. They’d gone still. I might have taken it for an almost hypnotic paralysis, a sign that something was deeply wrong, but Rachel turned and found a seat on the bench opposite Shadow Stalker.

  No, they were still themselves.

  My bugs made their way towards the Simurgh, while I chained the two relay bugs together to extend my range.

  Fragile, as it only required the death of one bug to sever my connection with the swarm. I didn’t mind. If she acted on my swarm, that was likely to be the least of our worries.

  Cameras changed focus, zooming in on the Simurgh’s face, hands and various wingtips, different cameras taking over as the Pendragon and the Dragonfly rotated around her and the cameras lost sight of the features in question. Mosaic views of her features, broken up like I might see if I were looking through the eyes of my bugs, but without my power to coodinate the picture, draw it into something cohesive.

  In the corner of each image, metrics, numbers, measurements, as if Defiant hoped to track the slightest movement.

  It was the hair that got me. Gossamer-fine, silver-white, straight, it blew in the wind as if each strand were a separate entity. Not in clumps or locks, but a curtain of strands ten times as dramatic as something one might see in a digitally altered hair commercial.

  Artificial.

  “Seventy,” Tattletale said.

  “Hm?” I asked.

  “I said I was sixty-five percent sure before. I’m revising it to seventy.”

  I nodded.

  Hello, Simurgh, I thought. We finally meet.

  The Protectorate was strict about who could join the fights against the Simurgh. Capes needed psychological evaluations, they needed to sign documents agreeing to the quarantine procedures, and they needed to be on board with the timetables.

  I’d been unable to participate when the Simurgh had attacked flight BA178. When she’d attacked Manchester, I’d been barred from joining the fight by bureaucratic red tape. I had a bad history and I was still on probation. Too likely that I was mentally unstable.

  When the Simurgh had hit Paris, I’d gone to Mrs. Yamada, hoping for a therapist’s bill of clean mental health. Or, if not quite that, then at least a go-ahead.

  She’d advised me to see it as a good thing, instead. That my participation would be another black mark on my record, another reason for people to be suspicious of me or second guess my decisions.

  She’d also very elegantly avoided spelling out that she wasn’t willing to give me that clean bill of mental health. I’d noticed, but hadn’t pressed her on it. She would have been forced to say it straight, and I would have had to hear her say it.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “I do the talking, you pass it on,” Tattletale said.

  I nodded.

  Tattletale sighed. “Look at her. The folly of man, am I right?”

  “I don’t know. You have a better idea about whether you’re right, but it… doesn’t fit to me.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You’re seventy percent sure.”

  “Seventy percent, yes. If I’m wrong, then I’ll be approaching this entire conversation from the wrong angle, and we might wind up siccing an otherwise passive Endbringer on humanity.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right, then,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Everyone ready?” I asked. I looked around the craft. No responses. Only silent nods.

  One head that was shaking. Shadow Stalker.

  I touched the screen on the console. “Defiant?”

  “Ready when you are,” he said.

  “We’re starting right now,” I said. I nodded at Tattletale.

  She rolled her shoulders, took in a deep breath, then sighed. “Hello, Endbringer, this-”

  I echoed her words, speaking through my bugs as an interpreter might speak in another language.

  The instant I had the first word out, alarms went off throughout the ship. The Dragonfly shuddered as meager weapons unfolded from the sides. My visual of the Pendragon showed it was reacting much the same way.

  Simurgh had reacted.

  She hadn’t attacked, but she had reacted.

  She rotated in the air, holding her position, wings flat at her sides. The wings were purely ornamental, much as Behemoth’s bulk and musculature had been. She used telekinesis to move, and she used it now to keep herself oriented in the air, rotating so she matched our orbit around her, her eyes and attention fully fixed on the Dragonfly.

  “Oh, shit,” Imp spoke, her voice wavering breathlessly halfway through the ‘shit’.

  Long seconds passed, but the Simurgh didn’t take any other action.

  “Th- this is Tattletale speaking, one face in that vast, crazy crowd of humans you’ve been murdering,” Tattletale finished. “Good to see you’re listening. I thought it was about time we had a chat.”

  No response, no movement. Odd, to see the screens showing her depicting the zoomed-in images of her face, hands, wings and body and not see them rotating in the picture as they had been before.

  Her expression was neutral, but then again, the Simurgh’s expression was always neutral. A face like a doll’s, a cold stare. Beautiful in every conventional sense, in that every classically attractive feature was there, from the delicate, thin frame to the high cheekbones to the luxurious hair… horrifying in the manner it was all framed. The height that put her two to three times the height of an ordinary adult, the wings that filled the space around her. The feathers were surprisingly tough and dense, the edges capable of scoring steel.

  Not that she really fought in close quarters, where she could help it.

  “Let’s face the facts, Simurgh. Ziz. Israfel. Ulama. Whatever you want to go by. You started acting funny pretty much right away, after Eidolon bit it. Maybe that’s mourning. Maybe you respected him as an enemy, ’cause he was one of only two individuals who could really give you guys a run for your money. Or maybe you had a different relationship.”

  Tattletale let the words hang in the air.

  “Maybe a parent-child relationship? Maybe he created you.”

  The Simurgh didn’t move a muscle. Her hair blew in the wind, and it caught on the features of her face, not even eliciting a blink of her eyes.

  I leaned over my chair to hit the button on my cockpit, giving me a view of the inside of the Pendragon.

  Defiant, Narwhal, Miss Militia, Saint, Canary, Parian, Foil, Golem, Vista and Kid Win were all present within. Defiant had collected the heroes, the capes who might have been less inclined to throw their hat into the ring if I showed up in the company of Tattletale, Imp and Rachel. He’d been closer to Parian and Foil when I approached him with the plan.

  I watched the expressions on their faces, the concern, the alarm and confusion I’d felt only minutes ago. I knew Tattletale hadn’t shared this particular detail. They had to be listening in with some microphone, either a directional one aimed at my swarm outside or one in the Dragonfly.

  “They say loneliness breeds the best masters, and it’s awfully lonely at the top,” Tattletale said. “Nobody that can really put up a fight, no excuse to flex his abilities to their fullest, nothing that can really give the man any real stature, next to Legend, who had all the face time with the media. No real role to play, compared to Alexandria, who was managing the PRT. Odd man out.”

  I thought of Eidolon, the first time I’d seen him in person. Meeting in preparation for the Leviathan fight in Brockton Bay… Eidolon had been standing off to one side, in a corner, lost in thought.

  “Symbiotic, odd as it sounds, what with you trying to kill him and him trying to kill you.”

  Still no reaction. No response.

&nb
sp; I noted the surroundings. The Simurgh had situated herself above the ocean, an eerie parallel to how Scion had first appeared before humanity. As battlegrounds went, it left her relatively little to manipulate when using her telekinesis, but it also gave us very little ground to stand on if a fight erupted. She’d torn apart Flight BA178. She could tear apart the Dragonfly or the Pendragon if she had a mind to.

  Hopefully the other ship would be able to flee, if we couldn’t manage an outright fight.

  Tattletale held up a hand, then spoke. “She’s not giving me anything.”

  I didn’t repeat it for the Simurgh. I only stared at the screens.

  “Did you expect her to?” Imp asked.

  “Yeah. Kind of,” Tattletale said.

  “She’s not human,” I said. “And, if you’re right about this, she’s only a projection. Her brain doesn’t work like ours does, if it’s even active.”

  “She responded when we communicated,” Tattletale said.

  I nodded. “Defiant, you listening in?”

  On the screen in front of us, Defiant turned to the camera, then nodded once.

  “Open to suggestions,” I said.

  “We could use powers to try and communicate,” Narwhal said. “Can we express a signal through some other channel? Through our powers?”

  “It might be taken as an attack,” I said.

  “She’s smart enough to figure out convoluted chains of cause and effect, but not to take a gesture of communication for what it is?” Tattletale asked. “I say we try it.”

  “Oh my god,” Shadow Stalker said, her voice quiet. “You’re going to get us all killed.”

  “Well, it might be a mercy,” Imp said. “Going out like that, not having to watch the golden man take humanity down piece by piece.”

  “Could we try Canary?” I suggested. “If she has any understanding of powers, or if Canary has any influence with things other than humans…”

  “I don’t,” Canary said, from within the Pendragon. “I tried using my power on dogs, cats, birds, monkeys…“

  Tattletale nodded, like this was something expected. “Bonesaw said something like that. When we get our powers, the passenger manages this sort of scan, trying to figure out a way to apply a part of itself. So Taylor gets a power that’s restricted to bugs, Canary gets a power that’s limited to people. At the same time, the passenger kind of figures out if there’s any danger of the power harming us, physically or mentally, and it sets down safeguards and limits. Headaches like Dinah or I get are part of that. And Eidolon…”