Tattletale was almost breathless, speaking faster, with more emotion. It was a challenge to convey that with a voice generated by the swarm.
“Or maybe you don’t care. Maybe you’re nothing more than what you appear to be on the surface. Head games and taking credit for shit you didn’t do. Maybe you’re just a projection, blank between the ears, mindless, heartless, pointless.”
The ship moved a fraction, then adjusted, the autopilot kicking in.
“Did you feel that?” I asked. Tattletale had gone silent, and there were no words left for me to translate.
“We did.“
A reaction? I adjusted the monitors, turning everything back to the Simurgh, looking for any clue, any hint.
But she didn’t have body language. Every action was deliberate. She didn’t have any that weren’t.
Tattletale’s voice was low. I did what I could to match it, speaking through a swarm of over a million individual insects and arachnids. “You’re supposedly this magnificent genius, and this is how you go out? With a whimper? Petering out like a stream without a source? You’re honestly telling me there isn’t anything more to you?”
Another rumble, another shift, somewhat more violent.
“Enough, Tattletale.” Defiant’s voice.
“They run on different patterns. Fair bit of anger, room for some vengeance. Cleverness, sure. More in her than in Behemoth. Some killer instinct, maybe… a blend of fear and caution. Not so they’re afraid, but so they can temper their actions. This? Right here? It’s the closest we’re about to get to communicating directly with a passenger.”
“I understand,” Defiant said. “But that’s enough.“
“They’re passengers?” I asked.
“The shell? No. The outer shell, the concept, the execution, they’re tapping into religious metaphors. The devil, the serpent, the angel, buddha, mother earth, the maiden, each connected in turn to fundamental forces. Flame, water, fate, time, earth, the self. Things deep-seated and fundamental to their creator’s belief system, because that’s how the passengers interpret our world. Through us. But deep down? Beyond that surface, beyond the basic programming that drives them to do what they’ve been doing for thirty years? It’s the passenger’s brush strokes. And I’m getting to her.”
“No you’re not,” Defiant said. “Because you’re stopping now.“
“Fuck that,” Tattletale said.
“You’re stopping now because it worked.”
One by one, the monitors throughout the Dragonfly shifted, until the one at the very front was the only one that still showed the Simurgh.
The Dragonfly changed course as we looked at the scene that was showing on every other monitor.
The Azazel, airborne. D.T. officers within were standing by the windows, while one with a camera was holding it above their heads, aiming it towards the window, pointed at the water.
A dark mass was beneath.
Leviathan, matching pace with the ship.
The Dragonfly and Pendragon broke from their orbit around the Simurgh.
The Simurgh followed.
■
The Yàngbǎn tore through the settlement, barely visible, as fast as arrows loosed from a bow.
One set of powers to give them speed, another to give them the ability to create crude images, illusions, blurry and indistinct.
A weak power, but far less so when coupled with the fact that they were making themselves just as blurry and indistinct. To top it off, they were making themselves invisible for fractions of a second, and they were lashing out with short blades of cutting energy when they reappeared, slicing through the Australian refugees.
Bombs went off, coordinated, ripping through the spaces the Yàngbǎn had already passed through, cleaning up the ones who’d survived, killing the rescue personnel who were trying to save lives.
Earth Tav, barely two million people spread out across the globe, with this being the largest population center, based around the portal that Faultline, Labyrinth and Scrub had erected.
Without this base for supplies and communication, the other settlements would falter. Disease would be crippling, food would be scarce at best.
And the Yàngbǎn would no doubt reap the rewards, claiming the planet for the C.U.I.
The Pendragon led the way through the portal, and it suffered the brunt of the bombs that the Yàngbǎn had left in their wake, no doubt to stop any reinforcements.
The Pendragon sank, no longer fully airborne, and the Dragonfly’s cameras could see as Golem, Vista and Cuff did what they could to patch it together.
Not enough. It landed, hard.
Another bomb went off as the Pendragon hit ground. Had the Yàngbǎn plotted that? A second line of defense?
“Everyone okay?” I asked.
“Give us a minute. Nobody dead.“
At least the Pendragon was a combat ship, meant to take a beating. If the Dragonfly had been the first one through, we would have been obliterated. At best, we’d have managed to evacuate with parachutes, flight packs and shadow-form powers.
We passed through the area the Pendragon had cleared. One small ship against what had to be thirty Yàngbǎn members. They didn’t move, but flickered, existing as scarce smudges and streaks of black and an odd midnight blue from the regions of their heads. They cast out more smudges in matching colors with their image generation powers, turned invisible for one or two seconds at a time when they saw opportunities to catch refugees off guard. Some merely killed. Others slashed at eyes or ears, removed hands. Butchered.
What would the C.U.I. want with scores of butchered people?
It wasn’t really the fault of the individual Yàngbǎn members. They were brainwashed, subsumed into this collective of shared powers, their identities erased.
But that didn’t make their actions forgivable.
The Simurgh followed behind the Dragonfly, moving each wing until it was pointed straight behind her as she sailed through the narrow, oddly-shaped portal.
When she unfolded her wings, extending each until a veritable halo of them surrounded her, a complete circle, I could feel my heart skip a beat.
“We need to give her orders,” Tattletale said.
I nodded, mustering my swarm into a group large enough to communicate.
But there was no need. She flew past us.
The singing had died down, but it welled up at full strength. I almost staggered.
Rubble began to peel away from the demolished settlement beneath us. Metal, bombs, pieces of structures.
As she reached less damaged areas, she picked up construction vehicles.
The fragments of metal around her were like a dense cloud, almost obscuring her, massive wings and all.
The singing increased in pitch.
A bomb detonated in the midst of the storm of debris, breaking up a bulldozer in the process.
Below her, the scene had gone still. Yàngbǎn raider and civilian alike had gone still. The smudges consolidated into forms.
Not the same Yàngbǎn I’d encountered before. These ones wore similar outfits, but there were bodysuits beneath, no bare skin. The multifaceted gem designs that covered their faces were dark blue, their costumes black.
Infiltrators. A sub-set. One of five sub-groups, apparently.
The debris settled into a single shape, drawing together. Nothing welded, nothing screwed in together. Merely a crude device, held together by telekinesis.
A fat, snub-nosed cannon, twice as long as she was tall. She fired it, and the resulting bullet was nearly ten feet across, a sphere of hot metal.
It crashed into a trio of Yàngbǎn.
She used her telekinesis to sweep it off to the right. The misshapen bullet was compressed into a rough sphere in the time it took to soar down a long road, smashing through two members of the Yàngbǎn. A bystander was clipped, spinning violently before collapsing in a heap. Shattered arm and ribs, if not dead.
I bit my lip.
“Don’t
injure civilians,” I communicated through the swarm.
She gave no sign she’d listened. Her telekinesis grabbed four members of the Yàngbǎn who’d gotten too close, lifting them by their costumes or by some other debris that had surrounded them.
As if launched by catapults, they flew straight up, where they disappeared into the clouds above.
I winced as the screaming increased in intensity by another notch.
Did she have to do that?
I felt a touch of paranoia, not just at the idea, but at the fact that I’d been concerned. Paranoia over the fact I was feeling paranoid.
The Simurgh had crafted another gun. They floated around her like satellites, firing only in those intermittent moments when she’d formed and loaded the necessary ammunition.
“Those are my guns,” Kid Win reported over the comms. “Bigger, but mine.“
I didn’t like that she was screaming. It set an ugly tone to this whole venture.
I really didn’t like that we couldn’t direct her that well. We were ending this confrontation decisively, we were probably even doing it more cleanly and with less damage to civilians than there would be if we’d handled it ourselves.
But we’d brought the Simurgh here and people were getting hurt as collateral damage. That was on us, everything else aside.
“I… don’t know what to feel right now,” Imp said.
“It doesn’t feel good,” I said.
“I wish I knew what I’d said that got her on board,” Tattletale said. “I went with the shotgun approach, trying to see what stuck… and now I don’t know what to leverage if we need to do it again.”
“You’re so whiny,” Rachel said. “You say we need her help, we got it. Good. Maybe now we can fight.”
“Mm,” Lung grunted. “This is true. But I’ve seen what happens if you do something like this, something big, and you fall. You fall hard.”
I nodded at that. “Wise words, Lung. Well said.”
“Do not talk to me,” he rumbled.
I only shook my head.
“Fuck me, you guys are serious?” Shadow Stalker murmured. “This is good? This is luck. There’s a reason I stick to my fists and my crossbow. They’re reliable. This Endbringer thing most definitely isn’t.”
“Of course it isn’t,” I said. “But you know that whole saying, finding a boyfriend? Young, smart, wealthy, pick two? We don’t get to pick two, here. Options at the end of the world: clean, safe, effective, pick one.”
“We got Bohu, but she doesn’t move fast at all,” Tattletale said. “Leviathan’s on his way to pay the Elite a visit. Collateral damage could be ugly there.”
“It isn’t sustainable,” I said. “Somehow, I don’t think they’re going to sit still if we ask them to. What happens if we run out of enemies to attack? If we need to put Leviathan to work and there aren’t any targets that don’t involve even more collateral damage than we’ll see when he attacks the Elite?”
“People are going to fall in line damn fast,” Tattletale said.
“Probably,” I said. “Or they’ll run for the hills.”
“Win-win,” Tattletale said. “We were saying we needed people to split up more.”
The Simurgh opened fire, striking out with three guns, striking a neighborhood that had already been reduced to dust and flame by a series of bomb blasts.
“Somehow,” Imp commented, “This doesn’t scream win-win to me.”
I nodded.
“Nothing saying this isn’t another clever plan, set up to fuck with us, destroy our last shreds of hope,” I said.
The Yàngbǎn were opening fire. Projectiles that moved slowly, splitting in the air until there was a virtual storm of them. Had they been aimed at the Dragonfly, we wouldn’t have been able to dodge. The Simurgh flew between the bullets like they weren’t even a concern. Debris blocked the shots.
In the midst of her maneuvering, she drew together a third gun from the storm of debris.
Then she somersaulted, heels over head as she rapidly shifted direction.
In the moment it took her to build acceleration, she looked directly at the camera.
Directly at me.
She’d heard me, she understood, and she had responded.
28.05
At least she’s stopped screaming.
The Simurgh floated in the air, remaining in a kind of stasis, much like she’d been in when we’d approached her, but there was an entire rig of devices surrounding her. A halo, almost, studded with guns and cannons at regular intervals. The sky behind her was overcast, clouds rolling past us with the strong winds, and mingled dust and smoke slowly shifting beneath her, brown-gray. The juxtaposition was eerie, the clouds of the sky moving faster than the smoke and dust, and the Simurgh between the two, utterly still.
On TV, back in the days when we’d had television, there had been the various talk shows, news segments and interviews where the Endbringers would come up. I’d listened, even though television wasn’t really my thing. I’d heard people theorize on the Simurgh’s scream, wondering out loud about just how many of the disasters that followed in her wake were her, and how many were our own overblown paranoia.
It helped to remind myself that I wasn’t the only one who was debating the possibilities. I’d listened for too long. Was I tainted? If this was all a trap, then I might already be seeded with some destructive or disastrous impulse. Should I be hypervigilant? Should I not stress over it?
It was a debate millions of individuals had maintained amongst themselves, in the wake of the Simurgh’s attacks. Invariably, there wasn’t a right answer. If she wanted to fuck with me, there wasn’t anything I could do. Anything could and would fit into her game plan.
It wasn’t just me, either. I was very aware of Lung’s presence, and of Shadow Stalker’s.
The Yàngbǎn were dealt with. There were two major raiding parties, if we judged solely by the colors of their masks, and three or four other sub-groups tasked with different functions. One raiding party was annihilated, and I could hope the Endbringer’s presence would scare off the other group.
There was an upside of sorts, in that the Yàngbǎn didn’t have access to Cauldron’s doormaking parahuman. It meant they moved exclusively through the portals that dotted Earth Bet, the same portals the refugees had used, which some stragglers were still using. Various factions and governments were gathering small armies at each of the remaining portals. One Earth was already lost to us, destroyed by Scion in the first day he’d been traveling universes. The South American refugees who had fled through there would be either eradicated or reduced to such a small population that it barely mattered. Earth Zayin, too, was gone, subsumed by the Sleeper.
Still, a dozen Earths remained, with people scattered all over them. The C.U.I. had claimed one, and they’d be ready for retaliation, maintaining a defensive line.
I doubted that defensive line would hold if an Endbringer decided to march through. No, they would be gathering their forces in anticipation of a possible attack. Good.
I took in my surroundings. One ramshackle settlement, more than half of it obliterated by bombs. Relatively little in the way of collateral damage on the Simurgh’s part.
Psychological damage? Quite possible. The Simurgh was a terror weapon, her very presence enough to rout armies, and these refugees weren’t an army. Morale had been low to start with.
I sighed. We’d scared people off, and they’d fled to the hills, quite literally. In a movie, this would have been the moment that people slowly began returning, the orchestral music swelling as they overcame their fear.
Ridiculous, in context. They’d hide for days, and they’d flee the second they saw the Simurgh again.
This wasn’t a case where we’d be able to stop the imminent threat and then recruit a select few people from among the survivors.
“Yo,” Tattletale said. She had to run to get up the last stretch of the little hill that overlooked Tav’s primary settlement.
&nb
sp; “Yo,” I responded.
“Total deadpan? You can be a little excited,” she said.
“I am. Quiet terror is a kind of excitement, isn’t it? Pulse pounding, heart in my throat, and I’m so tense I’m getting a headache, because I’m almost afraid to think.”
“You think I’m not? Fuck. There’s very few things that genuinely terrify me. One of them is hanging out right above us, building something, and I can’t even read her, which makes her one of the few things out there that surprise me.”
Building something? I looked up.
True enough, the Simurgh had her hands in front of her, and was manipulating debris in between her hands.
“What is she-”
‘I don’t know,” Tattletale said, interrupting me. “What do you want me to do? Ask her?”
I shook my head. “How are the Pendragon’s occupants doing?”
“Ship shape, but Defiant’s wanting to be careful. He’s demanding they get triple-checked. Kind of funny, seeing that from him.”
I shrugged. It would be a bigger leap for Tattletale to see the changes in him than for me to see it. I’d been acquainted with him over the past two years, while she only saw him here and there.
“They’ll be up for it if we have a fight?” I asked.
Tattletale shrugged. “For sure. Scratches, bruises, but that’s about it. We’re down to fight at a moment’s notice. Sad thing is, the worst thing Scion could do to us is wait a month or two before he comes back.”
“True,” I agreed.
Not a pleasant thought. If he took a leave of absence while we were trying to wrangle the Endbringers, odds were we’d get taken out by other factions or by the Endbringers themselves.
“I dunno,” Imp said. I managed to not be startled as she appeared. “Killing us all is pretty awful.”
“Awful, but not awful in the ‘let humanity destroy itself’ sort of way,” I pointed out. “Let us come up with a plan for fighting back, then disappearing? Letting that plan fester and fuck us over?”
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