by wildbow
While Armsmaster had his back turned to her, I saw Tattletale step to one side, surreptitiously.
Judas lunged, and in the same moment Armsmaster reacted, Tattletale made a move for the crowd, drawing her gun.
I glanced towards Armsmaster, and my view of him was blocked as Judas collapsed to the ground between us. Through my bugs, I sensed him extend his weapon towards Tattletale, felt the recoil as the head of it rocketed off. The grappling hook caught her gun hand with enough force to screw up her aim, and the tines of the hook closed around her arm.
He reeled in the chain at the same time he pulled it back toward him, and in doing so, flung Tattletale across the floor. The tines let her go just in time to send her careening into one of the flimsy cocktail tables. Armsmaster jerked the pole of his weapon to control the flight of the hook as it reeled back in, striking Tattletale’s gun out of the air and shattering it into pieces.
“No hostages,” he said. “No guns.”
Grue started to stand, fell, then managed to stand successfully on his second try. The three dogs Armsmaster had dropped were taking longer to get upright. Angelica shook her head violently, twice, paused, then did it again.
Armsmaster looked at Bitch, then slapped the pole of his weapon against the palm of his armored glove.
“Rachel Lindt, AKA: Hellhound.”
“Armsmaster, AKA: dickhole,” Bitch retorted.
“If this goes any further, I can’t promise those animals of yours won’t suffer permanent damage.”
I could see her eyes move behind the eyeholes of her mask as she cast a sidelong glance to her left to look at Brutus, then to her right, at Angelica. Then she met his gaze, “You do lasting damage to any of them, we’ll find you and do ten times worse to you. Trust me, old man, they know your smell, we can track you down.”
Again, the pole slapping against his glove with a sound of metal against metal.
His tone was measured as he asked her, “Why risk it? You’ve already lost. We had enough footage of your dogs that I was able to put together a simulation of their fighting patterns. I know how they attack, how they react. I know how you think in a fight, the commands you give, and when. All of that is wired into my suit, into my heads up display. I know what you and your beasts are going to do before you’ve decided on it. None of you are walking away.”
“It’s not just me and the dogs,” Bitch spoke.
“Your friends? I may not have a simulation set up for him, but I’m better than your leader, Grue. Stronger, better armored, better equipped, better trained. If your friend Regent turns his attention from Miss Militia for more than twenty seconds, she will shoot one or all of you, not that he could do anything to me if he bothered. Tattletale? Unconscious. Skitter? Not a threat.”
What was he doing? Why was he so focused on getting Bitch to admit it was over?
Reputation, yet again. He needed to salvage this situation, and the surest way to do that, to recoup his losses and come out of this looking okay, would be to get the meanest, toughest, most notorious of us to bend at the knee and concede defeat.
He really didn’t know Bitch, though.
She pulled her cheap plastic dog mask off and threw it to one side. It was only a formality, really, since her face and identity were public knowledge. Her smile, as it spread across her face, wasn’t the most attractive. Too many teeth showing.
“Lung underestimated her, too,” she told him, looking at me.
Armsmaster turned to look, as well.
Seriously? I mean, really, Bitch? Passing the ball to me? I didn’t have a plan. There wasn’t much I could do, here.
“Velocity?” Armsmaster queried me, casual.
I shrugged, miming his casual tone, while feeling anything but, “Dealt with.”
“Hm. I think—”
As he spoke, I faced Grue and jerked my head in Armsmaster’s direction. Armsmaster wasn’t oblivious, and took my cue as reason to drop into a fighting posture. There was nothing he could really defend against, though, as Grue shrouded the two of us in darkness a second time.
The worst possiblity, that Armsmaster would tell the Undersiders what I was planning, was dealt with for the moment. I doubted Armsmaster would continue to talk while under the effects of Grue’s power.
Which left me the problem of dealing with the guy. I could sense the bugs I had on him moving, as he came through the darkness, towards me. At the very least, if I could draw him away from the others, I could buy them time.
I ran for the glass door that led to one of the outside patios. I glanced over my shoulder, and sure enough, I saw Armsmaster emerging from the cloud of oily shadow. He spun on his heels to swing his flail into Judas, bringing the dog down as it emerged right after him, then whirled to face me again. As I got outside, the chain reeled in, bringing the flail head back to the top of the weapon. He paused.
Why? There was only one reason he’d be staying back and reeling in like that, instead of closing the distance to get me in his reach.
I took a guess. Knowing that the attack would come faster than I expected, from what had happened to Tattletale on the two occasions, I threw myself to the floor of the patio.
The ball came flying out of the end of his weapon, but my attempt to dodge did little good. He whipped the chain to shift the sphere’s trajectory, and simultaneously opened it into its oversized grappling hook form. The thing hit me in my side, with the tines passing over each of my shoulders and under my armpits. I grunted with the impact, and as I tried to stand, I nearly slipped on the excess chain that spooled around me in the grappling hook’s wake. I felt the claw of the hook tighten around my chest.
On the far side of the patio, Armsmaster planted his feet and raised his weapon to start reeling me in.
No, no, no, no, no.
I was not going down like this.
Not with Emma fucking Barnes and her asshole lawyer dad in the crowd.
I started to gather my bugs from inside, but stopped. No use bringing them here, when Armsmaster could murder half the swarm with that souped up bug zapper he’d worked into his halberd. I moved my bugs into position indoors.
Still shaky from the hit, thankful for the armor I’d built into my costume, I managed to grab the excess chain below me and wind it around the patio’s railing behind me. If Armsmaster wanted me, he’d have to come to me, dammit. I wasn’t going to make this easy.
The chain grew taut, and Armsmaster tugged twice before deciding it would be less trouble to approach than to add to the property damage. He closed the distance to me on foot, pausing only to free his chain from the patio railing. He reeled in his chain to pull me the remaining two or three feet to him.
“Skitter. I would have thought you would be quicker to surrender.”
Nobody else was in earshot. “Whatever side I’m on, I don’t exactly want to go to jail. Look, my offer stands. I’ve almost got the last bit of detail I need from these guys.”
“Something you said you’d have weeks ago,” he replied.
“There’s no other way you’re going to salvage this, Armsmaster,” I stood as straight as I could with the grappling hook around me. The damned thing was heavy. Tattletale had gone out of her way, even got herself knocked out of action, to let us know how important Armsmaster’s status was to him. I needed to use that. “Only way you won’t look incompetent is if you can say I only got away because you let me. That all of this tonight happened because you let it. Because letting me get away with this meant I could get the info on who’s employing the Undersiders, on where the funding, equipment and information is coming from. Then you clean up, and it’s two supervillain groups dealt with in the span of a week. Tell me that doesn’t sound good.”
Armsmaster considered for a moment.
“No,” he answered me.
“No?”
“Don’t expect anything other than a prompt arrest for you and your companions for your antics tonight,” he shook his head, “A bird in the hand, after all…”
He gave me a little shake, as if to make it clear just who the bird was.
I took a deep breath, “You were right, Armsmaster.”
“Of course,” he spoke, absently, pushing me against the railing with one hand. His grappling hook released me, reconfiguring into what I suspected was the same setup that had fixed Lung to the ground with bars of stainless steel, back in my first day in costume. It was shaped like a rectangle, and there were two ‘u’ shaped bands of metal with electricity arcing around them, the tips of each ‘u’ glowing hot enough to melt against any surface.
“This was over from the moment we stepped into the room,” I finished.
Nearly seven hundred hornets exploded from underneath my panels of armor, all latching onto him, biting and stinging relentlessly, flowing underneath his visor, into his helmet, his nose, mouth and ears. Some even crawled down beneath his collar, to his shoulders and chest.
I threw myself at the tail end of his halberd, hugging my body around it. With one hand he lifted me and the halberd both, and slammed us against the ground. Again, I felt those tendrils of electricity running over me, on top of the pain of having my stomach caught between the pole and the ground. I was very thankful, the second time tonight, for the panels of armor I’d implemented into my costume design.
He repeated the process, lifting me two or three feet off the ground, then slamming the pole and me down again. After the second time, I had to fight to place myself beneath the pole again in anticipation of a third hit, knowing he would weather the onslaught of hornets longer than I did this abuse.
Rescue couldn’t have come a second later.
Bitch, an unconscious Tattletale and Brutus were the first ones over the edge of the patio. Brutus bumped against Armsmaster as he passed, knocking the man off balance and giving me the chance I needed to heave myself upright and pull the halberd from his grasp. I held it in my hands, and he was too distracted by the swarming hornets to even realize it.
I threw the halberd over the edge of the patio and ran toward the door leading back inside. I caught Grue’s reaching hand as he and Judas bounded through, so he could swing me up behind him.
As we leaped from the patio’s edge, I looked behind us and saw Angelica and Regent following. Grue was banishing his darkness, to make the mess we’d created all the more clear for those of our audience that hadn’t yet managed to flee. Our objective was to humiliate, after all.
For much the same reason, maybe as a bit of a spiteful ‘fuck you’ to Armsmaster, who’d made this all so much harder than it had to be, I left my bugs where they were, arranged on the wall to the right of the patio and the floor in front of it. Half were gathered into the shape of two large arrows pointing to the patio door, one on the floor and one on the wall, while the other half were arranged into bold letters spelling out ‘LETS GO’.
I wrapped my arms around Grue, holding him tight as much in anticipation of our landing on a nearby rooftop as a farewell hug.
Chances were good that this was my last job as part of the Undersiders.
Tangle 6.7
Leaping from rooftop to rooftop was not as awesome or efficient as it was on TV and in the movies. Even if it was the dogs doing the brunt of the work, they weren’t the most graceful of creatures, they weren’t built to be ridden, and we didn’t have any saddles. There was also the distinct issue of there being buildings of wildly varying heights, similar to how Brian’s neighborhood sported old Victorian style buildings amid apartments and condos. As Judas hopped down from the side of a six story building, dug his claws into the side of a neighboring building to slow his descent, then jumped the rest of the way down to the asphalt of an alleyway, I was genuinely concerned the landings would dislocate my hip.
In short, I was grateful to be back on terra firma.
“Need a hand!” Bitch called out, a moment after Brutus set down. She had a prone Tattletale lying across her lap and Brutus’s shoulders, and it looked like Tattletale was falling off, despite Bitch’s best efforts to hold on to her.
I reluctantly let go of Grue as he slipped down from Judas and rushed over to help. I silently lamented having included the panels of armor on my chest and stomach, which had been a solid barrier between my body and his back as I clung to him on our retreat from the Forsberg Gallery.
Whatever my regrets, I wasn’t oblivious to the matter at hand. I hopped down off Judas’s back and hurried over to help with Tattletale, just a step behind Grue. It proved easier to slide her down to the sidewalk than to get her back up onto Brutus’s back. Grue did the heavy lifting, while I focused on keeping her head and arms from hitting the ground or getting caught under her. As I bent down to help ease her to the ground, I could already feel the stiffness in the muscles of my thighs, back and stomach. I was glad I’d done my morning exercise earlier, because there was no way I was going to be able to go anywhere tomorrow.
I glanced around us. Cars were zipping past on the streets at either end, but there weren’t many pedestrians, and none appeared to have spotted us, thus far. My suspicions were that most people in the downtown area who were out and about would be near Lord Street, celebrating the end of the curfew. People would be acting out their relief over the end of the ABB situation, making up for time they’d spent cooped up in their homes during the six nights of curfew.
“Anyone see capes following?” Grue asked.
“I didn’t see anyone, but I wasn’t really looking. That’s usually Tattletale’s job,” Regent replied.
“She can’t give us any info like this,” Grue pointed out.
“Wait,” I told him. I reached back into my utility compartment and fished out the changepurse. I removed the tissues I’d wadded up inside to keep the change from rattling and found one of the three tiny white packets at the bottom of the bag. I tore the packet open and held it under Tattletale’s nose.
“Smelling salts?” Grue asked.
I nodded. “You asked if anyone had any after we put down Über and Leet. I made a mental note to have ’em for next time.”
“I bet half of us did,” Regent replied. “The weird thing is that you actually followed through, dork.”
“What’s weird about that?” I asked, a bit defensively.
He was distracted from replying. Tattletale stirred, turning her head to get her nose away from the smelling salts. I moved them back under her nose.
She woke, mumbling, “Okay, stop.”
“Welcome back,” Grue told her.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“My stomach feels like someone ran it through a blender, and my arm hurts like hell, but I’m tougher than I look,” she said. Not one second later, she groaned and huffed out a breath, “But I’m going to need help to stand.”
Grue and I helped her. She was hurting, and moved at a glacial pace. It was made more difficult by the fact that she apparently didn’t want either of us to touch her right arm.
“What’d I miss?” she asked, as if to distract from the fact that she was moving like an old woman.
“Tee el dee arr, you got bitchslapped and knocked out, it was down to Bitch and Skitter, and we still got away,” Regent shrugged.
Tattletale froze in her tracks. Since Grue and I were still easing her to a standing position, I was forced to shift my grip to ensure she didn’t fall.
“Shit,” she managed to fit more invective into that one word than some of the people from my dad’s work could manage in ten, and some of those guys were seamen. Tattletale turned her head, “That’s not—”
“Not true,” Armsmaster spoke, echoing her words as he rounded the end of the alley.
He looked worse for wear. The lower half of his face had welts on it, not many, but some. I’d instructed the hornets to sting so they weren’t coiling their abdomens, which meant they weren’t squeezing the venom sacs and injecting venom with every sting. I’d only injected enough venom to make it hurt a little, to distract. After I’d beaten my retreat, though, I knew some would ha
ve stayed on him, and a few would have stung him after I was out of range and no longer able to control the hornets. The welts weren’t the bad part, though. What caught my eye, though, were the six thin trickles of blood running down the lower half of his face. Hornet bites weren’t necessarily capable of penetrating skin, as much as they might hurt, but there had been a lot of them, and if a few happened to bite in the same location, or if they caught the edge of an eyelid or nostril? Maybe. I noticed his halberd in his right hand.
When I looked at our remaining escape route, Dauntless was at the other end of the alley. Brockton Bay’s rising star. It would have been easy to peg him as a tinker, but he apparently wasn’t. His power let him, according to details he’d leaked when he’d appeared on TV and in magazines, imbue his gear with a little bit of power every day. Thing was, every bit of power he parceled out had permanent effects. Every day, he was just a little bit stronger than he’d been the day before. A little bit more versatile. It was expected that he would eventually surpass even the likes of Alexandria, Legend and Eidolon, the ‘triumvirate’ of the Protectorate, the top dogs. That kind of made him a big deal in Brockton Bay, a hometown hero.
I didn’t follow that stuff, didn’t buy into the hero worship. I’d always found the capes interesting, I’d followed the non-gossipy news about them, but with the exception of a phase around the time I was nine where I’d had an Alexandria t-shirt and had my mom help me find pictures of her online, I had never really got giddy over any particular hero.
Dauntless packed a few trademark pieces of gear. He had his Arclance, a spear he held in one hand that looked like it was made of white lightning. His shield, fixed to his left forearm, was a metal disc about the size of a dinner plate, surrounded by rings of the same kind of energy that made up the spear. Finishing his current set of empowered items were his boots. His feet looked like they were encased in the white crackling energy. If rumor was to be believed, he was working on empowering his armor as well, but I couldn’t see any hints of that energy on the costume. It was white and gold, and his golden helmet was in the Greek or Spartan style, with slits for the eyes, a band of metal covering his nose, and a slit running down lower half of his face. A band of metal crested the top, like a mohawk.