by wildbow
The only weapons I had were my bugs. There weren’t enough in my range, even with the relay bugs, to do anything to the suit. The model we’d just fought in Bitch’s territory had been able to bend steel, would have been able to tear my spider’s silk. I couldn’t hope to tie Azazel up. It was bigger and I was willing to bet it had more raw strength. Maybe it was better to say that I was confident enough it had more raw strength that I wasn’t willing to take the risk.
No, my bugs wouldn’t serve. I sent some cockroaches in to see if they could nibble through the insulation of some wires, but it felt futile. Even in what stood to be the more vital areas, like the neck, I doubted my ability to do any real damage.
What other tools did I have?
My voice.
Dragon was smart. Smart enough to write an A.I. that wouldn’t crumble to a simple issue with paradox. But the A.I. wasn’t necessarily brilliant. It had leaped to my defense when I’d said I was in danger. Either it wasn’t smart enough to discern truth from a lie, or it wasn’t allowed to when a life was potentially in danger.
I’d wondered if the machines were obligated to preserve our lives. Now I had a better sense of it. Now how to use it?
Regent and Imp were still fleeing the area on one of Shatterbird’s sleds. They had outpaced the drone ship, which was moving too slowly to pursue even Shatterbird. It was better suited, it seemed, for seizing and protecting an area than for pursuit. Good.
I drew out a message on Regent’s back. ‘Hide’. Imp was directly behind him, and bugs on a white shirt would be clear as day to her. I hoped. They were almost out of my range, relay bugs or no.
“You’re Azazel, correct?”
“Correct.”
“What’s the other ship called?”
“The Glaurung Zero is an old model, designed to deploy drones of varying loadouts.”
“Thank you for the information.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Don’t suppose you’ll tell me how to defeat you?”
“No.”
“Or your self destruct code?”
“No.”
“What if I told you that you were putting a human life in grave danger?”
“I have no reasonable cause to believe that.”
Damn.
But if it wasn’t designed to tell truth from a falsehood, maybe…
“Imp had a second trigger event. She should be invisible to your sensors.”
“I have no reasonable cause to believe that.”
“Doesn’t matter. Imp may be in this room. If you move a foot, you could be stepping on her.”
“Imp could not be in this room. As of two minutes ago she was recorded at a distance of .4 miles away from this location. She could not return here in that span of time unobserved.”
The suits were communicating. That was good to know, but it wasn’t exactly good. It made this harder.
“She could if Trickster leapfrogged her here,” I said. If Trickster was currently engaged in a fight with one of the other models, this could blow up in my face.
But the suit didn’t refute me. It didn’t speak at all.
“I used my power to signal Imp and Trickster and ask them to help. They’re nearby, and it’s very possible Imp is here. She could be crawling on top of you, for all you know. If you open your mouth, move your head or move a wing, you might be causing her to fall. With your head being where it is, it’s not impossible she could fall and roll into this nanotech hedge you’ve made, right?”
I waited for a response, for the canned reply saying Azazel had no reasonable cause ot believe it. Nothing.
Had it worked?
“Maybe I should be more specific,” I said. “I told them to help in general. They might not be helping me, so it’s very possible that any other suit might be in immediate proximity to Imp. Be careful you don’t accidentally crush her.”
No reply. Hopefully that would help the others somehow. It wouldn’t stop any of the ones in the air like that Glaurung drone suit, but it could stall others.
“Now,” I said, picking my words carefully, my pulse pounding, “I’m going to light a match and try to burn this thing away.”
I drew the matchbook from behind my back, grabbed a match from the box.
Hesitated.
If the hedge burned quickly enough to matter, what would happen? Azazel could easily spray me down in containment foam.
I began organizing my bugs, placing them on the ceiling, drawing out lines of silk cord.
The PRT could be entering my range any second, ready to take me into custody. I needed to be fast, but I couldn’t rush this. I was replicating the natural design of a spiderweb, three times over, but I was making each strand fifty or sixty times as thick, braiding other threads into cords and braiding cords into thicker strands.
It took a minute before I was satisfied. I was aware of the drone that hovered some distance over my head. I adopted a general runner’s pose, then lit the match. With my bugs, I was able to sense the safe distance I could raise my hand, match held high.
It burned faster than I would have thought. With a whoosh like I might expect from lighting a barbecue, it was gone.
A series of things happened in that instant. I pulled free of the branches that hadn’t burned away, sprinting for the exit, Azazel opened its mouth and began spewing containment foam, and the drone began speaking, “Attention Citizen…”
I maneuvered the spiderweb-nets into place in the stream. Two were far enough away to catch only a little, but the burden was heavy, growing more awkward for my bugs as the expanding foam captured some and rendered them unable to fly.
I still managed to drag the foam-nets into place, covering one drone’s eye-lens and the other’s gravity panel. They spiraled out of control, one striking a column, the other plummeting for the ground.
The other net was fixed just in front of Azazel’s mouth, strands already wound around the scales of its face. It tore free on one side, but the foam expanded, forming a beard, then covering its mouth.
The makeshift barrier had kept the worst of the foam from reaching me. I scrambled out of the way of the rest, narrowly avoiding getting the damned stuff on my costume.
Azazel’s chest opened, and a grappling hook speared out. Still trying to recover from dodging the foam, I couldn’t dodge it. It seized me, and I hurried to climb over the railing that surrounded the now-empty fountain to keep Azazel from drawing me up into its chest. Or into the foam that wreathed its head.
I climbed under the railing, to see if I could wind it up any further, then jerked to a stop. The hook was frozen in midair, still clutching the armor at my chest and shoulder.
Right. So this was how they’d planned to counteract Siberian.
I couldn’t free myself, and I couldn’t fight back, so I waited.
Armsmaster had said this technology drained his batteries, but Azazel could have a major power source in its chest.
It took only a minute before the hook went limp. I managed to pry myself free.
Other than opening its mouth to spray the foam and turning its head, Azazel hadn’t budged from its position.
With my swarm, I signaled Regent and Imp: ‘Good job. Come back fast.’
Without Bentley, I couldn’t cover enough ground. Couldn’t run. I found a hiding spot by the mall entrance instead. From the spot, I used my swarm to covertly keep an eye on Azazel, praying that whatever Dragon was doing was consuming her attention. Praying that she wasn’t about to override the simple head game I’d pulled on her hyperadvanced mecha-suit.
* * *
A very satisfying crunching noise rang through the minimall. I stood there, watching in approval with my arms folded as Grue, Sundancer, Ballistic and Genesis approached. I’d signaled Trickster to tell him to stay back. No use giving the suit a way to rationalize its way out of my lie.
“Is that the Azazel?” Grue asked.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“It’s not moving.”
<
br /> “Because I told it that it might crush Imp if it did.”
“Ah,” Grue answered. He didn’t ask for clarification.
“How’d it go?” Regent asked. Azazel had started venting the mist to clear away the containment foam, freeing its head and front claws where it had been covered in its own foam, but I’d already formed a mesh of spiderwebs to keep it from opening fire with any of its weapons. The mist had also exposed enough of Bentley for us to save him. Working together, we’d already cut the real Bentley free of the desiccated flesh of his larger self that contained him. The bulldog and Bastard were happily sitting between Bitch and I. Shatterbird was hammering at Azazel, smashing it repeatedly with a massive wrecking ball of condensed glass.
Sundancer spoke up, “We took down the hybrid model. Giant gun, was sitting in the stratosphere, shooting down Genesis every time she sent a body out into the open.”
“Our group took down two,” Bitch said.
“Where are the others? Shouldn’t more reinforcements be arriving?” Grue asked.
I shrugged, “If they come, I’ll know, and we can react. We’ve gotten this far.”
A minute passed, punctuated by the thud of the glass sphere against Azazel’s outer body. Only a little damage was done with each hit, but it was adding up. That, and it felt good, in a way.
Sundancer created an orb of flame and drove it into Azazel. I watched as the metal melted and the wiring burned in clouds of acrid black smoke. In the span of a minute, the suit was slag. I signaled Imp and Trickster to tell them it was okay to approach.
We watched the suit burn. Trickster and Imp joined us from the outskirts of the mall.
“I feel bad about this,” I said.
“Why the fuck would you feel bad?” Bitch asked.
“They must have put millions into manufacturing this. That was supposed to stop the Nine, and it was powerful enough that it might have, if it’d had Dragon’s brain backing it up.”
“They can build more,” Grue said.
“Scary thought,” Sundancer commented.
“We got lucky,” I said. “What with Imp being able to force Piggot to shut them down, and the way I could exploit it’s A.I. to lock down its movements. Maybe you can make a program versatile and leave yourself open to the program using loopholes to work around any safeties you put in place. Or you can make it heavily restricted and leave it open to vulnerabilities like what I exploited there. I guess we’re a ways off from an A.I. being smart enough to work around those limitations.”
“It’s a matter of time,” Regent said.
“You’re such a pessimist,” Imp retorted.
“And I’m so right.”
The suit continued to burn. Containment foam billowed out of a container within Azazel’s body, putting out the worst of the flames and leaving us with an assurance that Azazel wouldn’t be lurching back to life the second we turned our backs.
“Let’s go,” Grue said. “Four more suits to take down, and we don’t have long before it gets dark.”
I nodded.
We were half a block away from the minimall when a phone rang, startling the living daylights out of us. It was my satellite phone.
Dragon?
Tattletale: “Phones are back on.”
“Why? Is she baiting us? Trying to get us to reveal our positions?”
“She’s gone,” Tattletale replied. “Suits leaving the city, satellite phones are working. Few factors at play, there. I got word back from the Dragonslayers. Paid them a few million bucks to tell me how they keep getting the upper hand on Dragon, tell me how she’s relaying commands to her suits. With that, I had some squads plant C-4 and knock down cell towers. That slowed her down, cut her bandwidth, so to speak, and limited her ability to reprogram them on the fly. I’m guessing you guys took out one or more suits?”
“Three,” Bitch said.
“Two or three,” I clarified.
“That cost the Protectorate a good chunk of cash, and it’s detracting from Dragon’s primary mission, which is the Nine. My guess is she’s zeroing in on them. Better to have a few suits closer to where she thinks they are than to leave them here in the city for you guys to keep breaking. So she thinks, anyways, and the bigwigs that are footing the bill seem to agree.”
“I can live with that,” I said.
“I think we all can. It doesn’t mean there won’t be more coming down the road. But whatever else she does, she won’t be able to sell the local government on the idea that victory is a hundred percent assured, and she’ll have to justify the costs to the PRT. That means we’re getting a reprieve. When she does come back, it’ll only be because she’s certain she can win.”
I glanced around at the others. “That’s good to know, kind of.”
“What’s important is it won’t be in the next little while. If they intend to send someone like Eidolon or Alexandria here, even, it won’t be anytime soon. So I can give you the official announcement. We won. Job complete. The Pure have hauled ass out of town, Faultline’s apparently decided it’s safer to be out of the city, and you’ve humiliated the heroes enough that they can’t honestly contest your claim. There’s nobody left.”
“The city is ours?” Grue asked.
“The city is ours. And here’s the thing. Order from the one in charge,” Lisa paused, and her meaning was clear. An order from Coil. “You’re done. Good job. Your final order for the time being is to take a few days off. No costumed tomfoolery. Go back to your territories, make sure things are okay, but no getting into fights. If I see you out in costume, you’re fired. Hell, I’ll shoot you.”
It sounded like a joke, the way Tattletale put it, but the deeper meaning was clear. Coil was telling us to stand down. No matter what.
“Just like that?” Grue asked.
“Yeah,” Tattletale said.
“I was going to go out,” I said. “Uncostumed, don’t worry, but um—”
Didn’t want to say where I was going on a line the heroes might be listening in on.
“I get it,” Tattletale said. “I know where. One sec.”
A pause. No doubt while she checked with Coil.
“Okay. Cool,” she said.
“I can go? It won’t cause issues?”
“No issues. So long as you—”
“I know,” I cut her off. So long as I left the costume at home.
“We’ll talk later,” she said. “Gonna go see if I can get more details on what happened. Betting someone blew their top when they realized you guys demolished two of those suits.”
“Three,” Bitch said.
“Sure, three,” Tattletale clarified. “Ta ta.”
She hung up.
Our group paused, each of us looking to the others, as if we couldn’t believe it, or we were measuring each other’s reactions.
We’d won. We’d cost the PRT too much in resources, pride and money, and they’d apparently decided it wasn’t worth their time to uproot us. I hated the bureaucracy, the fucked up mindset of the institutions, but it was clearly working in our favor here, at least.
Coil had his city. There was nothing more I could do. The only thing stopping Coil from following through on his end of the deal and releasing Dinah was, well, Coil.
I exhaled slowly, letting out a deep breath that I felt like I’d been holding in for a month.
Monarch 16.6
“We should throw a party,” Imp said. “Celebrate. Rub it in a little.”
“Rub it in?” Grue asked.
“Yeah. Party in the streets, maybe some fireworks. Show the heroes that we know we won and we’re doing fine.”
There were a few chuckles from the others. Regent and the Travelers, primarily.
“In what way is that even close to being a sensible idea?” Grue asked.
“I didn’t say it was sensible. But it’s fun, and that’s why we got into this, right?”
“No. No it isn’t. It was maybe a side-bonus when I joined the group, if anything, but thing
s have changed since then. I warned you this would be hard work, that it wouldn’t be fun and games. And throwing a party to celebrate a win is a monumentally bad idea when we don’t even want the heroes to know we consider this victory anything out of the ordinary.”
“It is out of the ordinary. We’re not giving anything away if we’re celebrating scaring off Dragon.”
“I kind of have to agree,” Regent chimed in. Grue turned his way, and I could imagine the death glare that was behind his mask. Probably scarier than the mask itself.
“Maybe you’re right,” Grue said, “Maybe, I won’t say you’re absolutely right there—”
“Of course not,” Imp said, sighing.
“—but we definitely don’t need to rub it in the heroes’ noses. Not if it means they have both an excuse and motivation to try this again, sooner.”
“If you’re afraid of that, we’ll never be able to celebrate a win.”
“I’m okay with that,” Grue said.
“Do we get to chime in?” Trickster asked. “Because I’m siding with the Imp, here. Morale could become pretty important if we’re going to be building up individual gangs and collections of henchmen.”
Grue sighed. “Feeling outnumbered here. Skitter?”
“What?” I blinked. “Sorry, not keeping track of the conversation.”
“She’s out of it. Tattletale broke Skitter when she said we won,” Regent said.
“I’m… I’m alright. Lost in thought.”
Grue settled a hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t read his expression with his mask in the way.
I sighed and confessed, “I’m… I guess I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Isn’t that what happens? The second things start to go right, the next disaster strikes? Empire Eighty-Eight, Leviathan, The Nine, Dragon…”
“That’s a pretty defeatist way of thinking,” Trickster commented. “Didn’t Tattletale basically say that there’s nobody left to cause us any problems?”
“There’s always something,” I said. “I’d rather anticipate it and be ready.”