by wildbow
“You can see through their eyes, hear what they hear? Can you see the suit that was outside?”
The armored mech was moving, its limbs outstretched to catch the air with the flying-squirrel wing flaps. Panels around its body were venting out hot air and giving it lift, and the giant wheel was tilted back at a forty-five degree angle. The suit was clearly designed to fly forward, relying on the wing flaps to make intricate and acrobatic twists and turns in the air. Sundancer’s miniature sun was blocking the suit’s progress, forcing it to make lengthy detours and twist in the air, stalling and dropping several feet before it could catch the air beneath it again. More than once, it lost more ground than it gained while retreating from the burning orb.
“Yeah. It’s handled,” I called out, from behind the desk. My swarm felt the Director make a hand motion, apparently to signal Weld. As he began advancing towards me, I stayed low and retreated into a cubicle.
The Director spoke, “More will come. Not just the seven suits that are currently in Brockton Bay. So long as you hold this city, Dragon will bring in more suits on a weekly basis. Dragon will shore up weaknesses, augment strengths. If you’re lucky here, you might win. I’ll credit you that. But you won’t get two or three days of rest before you have to fight again. How many times can you abandon your territory before your followers abandon you?”
The swarm’s buzz helped mask the location of my voice. “How many times can you afford to let the crooks clean up your messes before the public realizes your Protectorate is little more than good PR, fancy talk and wasted tax dollars?”
“We’re doing more than you think,” she responded.
“And less than the people need. I’m filling a void you people left behind. If you were doing a satisfactory job, I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing.”
Come on, come on.
“Don’t act stupider than you are, Skitter. The city can’t step in to help the people in your territories because we can’t trust you. Your Bitch is already mauling anyone that sets foot in her territory. Any electrician, carpenter or doctor that we send into your territory might come back to us dying from anaphylactic shock.”
I shut my mouth. I didn’t have a response to that. At least, I didn’t have a response which wasn’t a mere, I promise I’ll be good.
It wasn’t worth worrying about, because I didn’t get the chance to reply anyways. There was a crashing sound and the lights cracked. Fragments and splinters of glass showered down on top of us as everything suddenly went dark. To take maximum advantage of this shift in circumstance, I complemented the effect by moving the bugs I’d gathered just outside the windows, blocking the meagre light that was filtering through the screens and plunging the entire room into a dimly lit twilight.
I drew my knife and bolted. Glass crunched underfoot and caused my feet to slip under me as I ran. Assault charged my way, one arm still covering his mouth. More bugs covered the lenses of his mask, but they slid off him as if he were oiled. His power at work.
With the bugs around me, I pulled a quick, crude decoy together, running in one direction as my bugs moved in another, slightly closer to him. In the dim, his mask partially covered, he went after the decoy. When his hand passed through, he reached just a little further to grab a desk and heave it my way.
Once again, I only barely managed to dodge by throwing myself to one side. My landing was hard, undignified, and ended with the armor of my mask and shoulder hitting the corner where two walls met.
“What are you hoping to accomplish?” the Director called out.
I stood, trying to look as if I was considering my answer. Weld was approaching, and Assault stood ready to attack. Not like he had anything to lose—I was cornered, quite literally.
I turned the knife around in my hand so the blade pointed down and slashed to my right, cutting the bug-covered screen with a loose ‘x’. Assault lunged for me, crossing half the room with a single leap. He was too late—I let myself fall through the third story window.
The outdoors were startlingly bright after the gloom of the building’s interior. I felt my hair whip around me for one second, then landed, sprawling, in a dim setting.
I hadn’t fallen the full distance. I was inside again, surrounded by the other heroes. I had only a second before they realized what I’d done. I turned and slashed the screen behind me, throwing myself from the window a second time.
Again, Trickster swapped me with one of the heroes. I landed with my feet skidding on the floor beneath me and caught the windowsill for balance. I waved: my signal.
“Get away from the window!” Assault bellowed.
Then I was teleported yet again. I found myself back in the alleyway I’d been in with Grue. Clockblocker was facing away from me, Grue was gone.
A quick check showed he wasn’t moving. Grue had caught him off guard, and his initiative had beat out Clockblocker’s concern about potentially disabling an ally. Clockblocker was frozen by his own borrowed power. Perfect.
I reached behind my back and unspooled the length of thread. My bugs took hold of it at various points along its length and began traveling across Clockblocker’s body, winding the silk cord around him and tying it in knots.
With luck he wouldn’t be a threat even after he got loose.
I reached out with my power to assess the general situation. Grue’s darkness surrounded the area, keeping the officers and PRT uniforms at the blockades from opening fire.
The mechanical suit that had been perched on the rooftop nearby was on the ground now, fighting Sundancer, Shatterbird and Grue, the latter two of which were out in the open.
The plan was to avoid leaving cover, I thought.
The wheel on the back of Dragon’s machine was already spinning at full speed. I could make out a red eye in the center, identical to the ones that had been on the drone. The suit thrust itself forward with the vents around its body, lunging for Grue, and Trickster swapped Grue’s location with a PRT uniform, putting Grue on the rooftop. It avoided hitting the man by dragging its two left claws in the pavement, lifting its tail so it wouldn’t swing around and strike him.
The wheel blazed with a wreath of electricity, the entire suit thrumming with enough charge to kill every bug touching it. Without warning, the wheel flared and Grue was yanked over the edge of the rooftop by an invisible force. Trickster caught Grue, swapping him for the same officer before he was halfway to the ground.
This is Dragon’s counter to a teleporter? I would have called it a magnet, but Grue wasn’t carrying or wearing anything substantial with metal on it. Or was this the suit Dragon had deployed against Genesis, Ballistic or Bitch?
Maybe I was missing something.
I used my swarm to keep the windows blocked and the people inside under assault, just enough that they couldn’t recover and complicate an already dangerous situation. I tried to position the bugs I could spare so they hovered around the sensors and the ‘eye’ of the wheel. Shatterbird was pelting it with a stream of glass shards that looped back in her general direction to rejoin the stream and strike over and over again.
It didn’t work. The thing targeted Grue again and hauled him a hundred feet towards it. Still crackling with electricity from its nose to the tip of its tail, it advanced on him, tail stretching forward to reach for him.
The machine suddenly shifted position and powered its thrusters to lunge away. Sundancer’s orb erupted from the ground just behind the spot the suit had been standing. I could see Grue raising his hands to shield his face from the waves of heated air as he scrambled to his feet and ran.
The first of the reinforcements arrived. I recognized it as the suit that had been deployed against Leviathan. The same one that had gone after Tattletale, unless she had more than one. This one had the foam sprayer. It set down on the edge of the battlefield opposite the wheel-dragon.
We took too long. Or the suits had arrived too soon. There wasn’t really a difference. The wheel-dragon must have pulled Grue from cove
r and forced Shatterbird to step up to help, and my own invasion of the main building had taken just a little too long, giving Assault a chance to get his bearings and hit me.
My swarm informed me in advance of the second of the suits that were arriving on scene. The wheel-dragon thrust itself forward, skimming the road’s surface to put itself next to the PRT headquarters. The drone-deployment suit set down on top of a nearby building so they were spaced out evenly.
They had Grue and Shatterbird surrounded. I stood off to one side, between the drone-deployer and the foam-sprayer, still too close for comfort but they didn’t seem to have noticed me.
I glanced towards the building where Trickster and Sundancer were holed up. Sundancer wasn’t moving her sun, and Trickster was apparently unable to see a valid target to swap Grue for. The officers and PRT uniforms had been disabled while I was indoors, and both Kid Win and Miss Militia lay at the base of the building.
I used my bugs to write him out an order: ‘swap me for sun, swap me for kid’.
A long second passed. Was Trickster illiterate? Why was it so hard for him to notice the key info I was trying to write down—
I found myself surrounded by darkness. Only a slit of light filtered into the room through the plywood. Trickster stood beside me, and the words I’d written out with bugs were on the plywood. He’d swapped me for Sundancer.
“You sure?” he asked. He’d gathered what I was hoping to do.
“Yeah,” I said. I pressed my knife into his hand.
He moved me in an instant, putting me at the base of the headquarters, facing a wall. As I turned around, the three suits shifted position to look my way.
Trickster stepped out of the building, the tip of my knife pressed to the point where Kid Win’s chin joined his neck.
We could have used Sundancer’s sun to threaten the people inside the building and get the suits to back off, but I didn’t trust her to be mean enough. I didn’t have much respect for Trickster as a human being, but that was an advantage when we needed someone to be more vicious.
The suits stood down. I could see the wheel spin to a stop, the drones returning to dock.
Right. Dragon wouldn’t risk a human life. She’d discarded her suit rather than let an established criminal die. She wouldn’t let a young hero die for the sake of getting us into custody.
“Let’s go!” Trickster called.
I hurried to cross the area between the three Dragon-suits, Grue joining me halfway. Trickster backed up with a barely conscious Kid Win in his grip.
We’d nearly reached safety when one suit shuddered to life. Trickster spun around, still holding Kid Win, turning his attention to the wheel-dragon. The wheel was moving again. “No funny business!”
It wasn’t the wheel-dragon that attacked. Before I could open my mouth to warn Trickster, the suit with the containment foam sprayed him, swamping him from behind. The weight and force of the spray knocked his knife-hand away from Kid Win, and the swelling, gummy mess kept it away. The sprayer proceeded to slowly bury the two of them, trapping hostage and hostage-taker together.
“Swap for Miss Militia!” Grue shouted, turning around as the drones began deploying once again. The wheel was getting up to speed, crackling with electricity.
“Can’t—Can’t turn my head to get a look at her!” The foam was spraying him from behind. If he turned his head, he’d be blinded.
And we weren’t in a position to grab her and haul her into Trickster’s field of view. It would take too long. Drones were sweeping down onto the street level, moving into position so they hovered above Grue and I. I waited for the electrical charge to hit.
It didn’t.
The drone tapped my head as it descended. I stepped back and let it descend slowly to the ground.
The foam sprayer had stopped. Trickster was buried up to his waist, Kid Win face down in the foam in front of him. The wheel was spinning down for the second time in the span of twenty seconds.
Trickster swapped himself for Kid Win, putting himself knee-deep in the foam. He craned his head around and managed to get Miss Militia in his sight, then swapped for her.
We ran, following after the others, who’d already left the battlefield.
“Why did they stop?” Grue asked.
I shook my head. “Tattletale?”
I kept waiting for the suits to perk up and give chase, or for further reinforcements to appear. There was no pursuit. Fifteen minutes passed before we had to stop, settling in an abandoned building to hide and catch our breath.
I sorted out my weapons, taking my knife back from Trickster, and sat down to rest. I ran my fingers through my hair to get it in a semblance of order.
My fingers snagged on something. For a second, I thought maybe I’d gotten some containment foam in it.
No. My hair was tied around a piece of paper. I had to use my bugs to untie it.
I recognized the lettering. A series of symbols that all strung together so it was hard to tell where one began and one ended. I’d designed it, when I was making up the code to keep my superhero notes private.
I’d left myself a message? When?
“I gave myself a reminder, telling me to take our group to the south end of the main beach,” I said.
“The fuck?” Regent asked.
“I dunno,” I said. “But we didn’t get the hostage we’d planned on taking, so I think we should go, if nobody else has a better idea.”
* * *
It took some time to get there, sticking to back alleys and roads, and it took more time to verify that there were no threats in the area.
As confusing as the message was, everything made sense when Imp made her presence known, dropping the veil of her power’s effect.
Right. I’d had her tie the note into my hair so it wouldn’t confuse or distract me while I was in the field, something I’d only notice after the fact.
She was practically bouncing with excitement.
“Saved your asses,” she said.
“And she’s never going to let us forget,” Regent commented.
“You got out okay?” Grue asked.
“I marched the fatty out of the building as soon as I’d made sure the robots weren’t going to attack again. Grabbed the keys from a cop and drove off. No way you can say I’m useless again, Tricksy.”
Trickster looked at her ‘guest’. “I won’t.”
Director Piggot, the fat woman, was handcuffed and kneeling beside Imp, head hanging.
“Well,” I said. “Could have gone better, but we got what we needed. You had her order them to shut down, right?”
“Yup.”
“Dragon must have given the Director the ability to command the suits. Wouldn’t have guessed,” Grue said.
I nodded in agreement. “It’s a matter of time before they arrange some workaround, take away the Director’s access or Dragon reprograms the suits, but this is good. We’ve got some leverage now.”
The Director raised her head to direct a glare at us with swollen, bloodshot eyes.
Funny as it was, I couldn’t bring myself to feel bad about it.
Interlude 16 (Donation Bonus)
February 2nd, 2001
The helicopter’s rotors stirred up billowing clouds of dust and debris as it landed.
Evan leaned forward from the chopper’s passenger seat, hitting the button for the intercom. The interior of the helicopter buzzed with his voice, “Check!”
“Clear!” Lady shouted. Pyne echoed her.
“Gun up!” He told them. He followed his own instructions, unstrapping himself from his seat and collecting his machine gun.
“Bird one landed, over,” the radio buzzed.
He pressed the button, “Squad two here. We just touched ground, over.”
“Waiting on a response from three, over.”
“Give me a few minutes and I’ll be in the air with Pyne for supporting fire,” the pilot said.
Evan nodded. “Wish us luck.”
&
nbsp; “Luck.”
He opened the door separating the cockpit from the chopper’s midsection. Four uniforms had been seated in the corners, and were now unbuckled and double-checking their guns and ammo, outfitting themselves with the additional gear that had been tied together and strapped down in the center of the chopper. Tieu and Coldiron carried the grenade launchers and ammunition: grenades, flashbangs, incendiary and smoke. Holler and Shane were the guys big enough to haul the extra guns and the packs with ammo clips and supplies.
Pyne and Lady were still kneeling behind the turrets that looked out over either side of the vehicle. The pilot would be manning the guns for the front. The pilot, Pyne and Lady were the only ones certified to use the containment foam, the latest addition to the arsenal of the Parahuman Response Teams.
Their entry hadn’t been quiet, and he’d expected at least one of the vehicles would see some sign of trouble quickly after they landed. Maybe it would be the terrified populace of Ellisburg, maybe their target would show up right away. He hadn’t quite expected this. It was empty, a ghost town. Rain, rain and more rain, not a light on in the small town, not a single soul to be seen.
“Here’s the lowdown,” he spoke to his squad. Hearing his own voice was reassuring—the only other noise was the drum of rain on the roof of the helicopter and the sound of ammunition clips snapping into place. “We have him pegged as a high level changer. Who can tell me the standard protocol for dealing with a changer classification?”
“Formation is top priority, trust nothing and nobody, passwords, hit hard and obliterate,” Holler said, his voice characteristically quiet.
“And for a changer that’s off the charts?” Evan asked.
There was a pause as his squad tried to recall if this had come up in training.
“Formation is number one priority, trust nothing and nobody, passwords, hit hard, obliterate… and pray?” Lady asked.
The others all chuckled, some more nervously than others.