Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Weld struggled to find something to say, failed.

  Clockblocker went on, “Kid Win and I stopped some lunatics in gas masks from mixing ammonia and bleach into a poison gas. You know why? They wanted to off the people in an apartment block so they could loot the place and stay there. There’s people going fucking crazy out there, and you’re talking training.”

  “I didn’t mean now,” Weld protested, backpedaling, “I was thinking in terms of the future. The training would be something to look forward to, after this crisis has passed.”

  “You’re assuming it’s going to pass,” Shadow Stalker replied, her voice tired. “Some are saying this is the way things are going to stay. I almost agree with them. This isn’t the kind of city that bounces back from things.”

  I’m losing them. “I can’t believe that. We’ve got to have hope.”

  “Pull a fifteen hour patrol out there, then come back and talk to me about hope,” Clockblocker spoke. “You know, I could almost play along. Go with the blind optimism, say yippee to training. But you don’t even mention the guy you’re replacing? A few words for the dead? It’s a matter of respect, bro.”

  “I didn’t mean to dismiss them or their sacrifice. I just didn’t know them, and-”

  Clockblocker turned, swiping his arm angrily at his helmet to snatch it off the counter. Tucking it under one arm, he spoke to the others, his back to Weld, “I’m going to check on my family. I’ll head there in costume, in case I run into trouble, be back in the morning. Mind manning the console, Kid?”

  Kid Win shook his head, “I need to take a break anyways.”

  Vista glanced at Weld, then asked, “Where do you guys need me?”

  “Go sleep,” Shadow Stalker spoke, placing a hand on Vista’s head as she walked past the girl, “I’ll start my patrol, go with Clock to make sure he gets home and that he has some backup. You can relieve me when I’m back, maybe get Clockblocker to go with you.”

  “Thank you,” Vista’s voice piped up, with a definite note of relief.

  Helplessly, Weld watched as the team split up to go their separate ways, Kid Win sitting down at the far end of the computer station, Shadow Stalker and Clockblocker heading for the elevator.

  “I fucked up. I already lost them,” Weld spoke, mostly to himself.

  “No. They’re just tired,” Vista spoke from beside him. “And not just lack of sleep. You’ll see what I mean. You could’ve mentioned Aegis and Gallant, but you can’t be blamed if Clockblocker didn’t give you time to get around to it. Nobody’s really in the mood for speeches.”

  “Right,” Weld replied, feeling lost, “Aegis and Gallant. They’re the ones who died?”

  Vista gave him a look that could only be described as pity. “You didn’t even learn their names? Nevermind what I just said. Yeah, you fucked up.”

  Then she turned away and walked back to the cubicles. She was halfway there when he saw her rub at one cheek with the back of her hand.

  “I… I just got here,” Weld said, helplessly.

  I just got told by a pre-teen, he thought.

  “Shit,” he swore under his breath. He found a chair in front of the computer and dropped the stack of file folders on the nearest flat surface. He plucked the file folder off the top of the stack, opened it and began studying.

  9.02

  Flechette spoke, “You’re a hard person to fin-”

  Shadow Stalker, transparent and wispy, whirled on the spot, not even pausing as she fired her crossbows. The first bolt went wide. Flechette caught the second out of the air, staggered back a step as she was caught off balance. Her right foot skidded to the edge of the rooftop.

  “What the hell!?”

  Shadow Stalker rose from a crouch, becoming opaque in the process, “Oh. You shouldn’t sneak up on people when they’re on patrol.”

  What? I nearly get shot and she blames me?

  “You nearly killed me!”

  “It’s a tranquilizer shot, and you have the fire escape behind you.”

  Flechette turned to see Shadow Stalker was right about the fire escape. The bolt in her hand had a glass shaft, filled with fluid, a three-pronged head with a wider cross-shaped flare at the base of it to prevent it from stabbing too deep. Tinker made? “Geez. You shaved a year off my life, doing that.”

  “Sorry. A little twitchy. Good to see you,” Shadow Stalker crossed the roof, offered a hand. Flechette shook it.

  “I suppose being twitchy is excusable,” Flechette excused Shadow Stalker, looking out beyond the rooftop to the dark streets. Some of the buildings looked ready to fall over, and the main street below the pair had a two-foot crack running down the middle. Water covered everything at the ground level, a half-foot deep. “And the apology is accepted.”

  “So. You joining the team?”

  “No. Temporary stay, until you guys fill out your ranks again. Maybe a few weeks, maybe as much as a month or two. Weld told me you were out on patrol, that you might need backup.”

  “I don’t do backup, and I don’t do the team thing unless someone makes me, but I’m willing to hang with another crossbow aficionado. Is that the right word? Aficionado?”

  Flechette smiled, “It is. The brown haired guy at the computer told me you’d be around here. Took me almost two hours to spot you, though I did get sidetracked by some kids taking clothing from a broken display window. We’ll patrol?”

  “Sure,” Shadow Stalker agreed, lowering her eyes to her crossbows as she picked bolts out of one of the three cartridges mounted on her forearm and loaded them into her crossbows. “You look like a rooftop type. Fly? Glide? Grappling hook?”

  “Grappling hook,” she patted her weapon, touched the chain that ran along her arm to the automatic-firing crossbow, her arbalest.

  “If you can’t keep up, don’t worry about it. Keep moving in a straight line, I’m mostly untouchable, hard to spot, so I’ll scout ahead for trouble, double back every minute or so to check on you.”

  “Got it.”

  Shadow Stalker swept her cloak over one shoulder, simultaneously shifting into her shadow state. She turned and leaped twenty feet to the side of a neighboring building. Grabbing a windowsill, she vaulted herself another fifteen or so feet straight up the face of the building, caught another windowsill, and then heaved herself up once more to reach the rooftop. Her cloak billowed out around her, and Flechette saw how Shadow Stalker’s costume clung to her body. One of the surprisingly few people who could wear a skintight costume without armor pads or features to mask minor physical imperfections and emphasize or suggest certain features.

  When Shadow Stalker had disappeared from view, Flechette remembered she was supposed to follow. She cocked her arbalest, flipped a switch beneath the trigger while sending a burst of her power through her weapon to connect the chain to the ammunition, and then fired a needle with an attached chain to the edge of the rooftop.

  The needle bit deep, and the chain went taut. A second later, she was reeling in. The pull of the chain wasn’t quite enough to carry her straight to the rooftop, but the pull of the chain coupled with her ability to plant her cleats into the face of the building and run up the building face let her reach the edge of the roof. A bit of momentum, one hand and her cleats gave her what she needed to hop over the roof’s edge.

  Running across the rooftop, she used her index finger to flip the switch, severing the chain, then reconnected the chain to the next piece of ammunition as her free hand loaded it into place. It took her a second to spot the vague blur that was Shadow Stalker, almost three buildings ahead of her. The girl was practically gliding as she fell, moving more horizontally than vertically.

  It was a drop to the next rooftop, Flechette noted. She touched the front end of the needle that was mounted in her arbalest, used her power on it.

  Capes with the ‘breaker’ classification were generally those who had some ability to ‘break’ the natural laws of the universe as far as those laws applied to them. Shadow Stalker wa
s one. Scion was apparently another. There were others who could slow or stop time in relation to themselves, change their effective orientation in respect to gravity or make themselves effectively larger without the exponentially increasing the stresses that the increased size and mass would normally place on their body. Almost always, such powers came with some physiological changes that let them manage despite the altered environment they were effectively operating in, allowing them to breathe and walk at the very least.

  Flechette wasn’t a breaker, though her power came close. Technically, she was a striker, a cape with the ability to apply some effect by touch or at point-blank range. The striker classification could include certain breaker effects as they were applied to things other than the cape themselves, but not always. Other strikers included those who used energy weapons, those who had certain kinds of superstrength that weren’t accompanied by durability and those with pyrokinesis or such that didn’t extend more than a foot around them. The way she used her ability, coupled with the intuitive understanding of angles, trajectories and timing she got from her secondary powers, gave her a low rating as a ‘blaster’. A cape with a ranged attack.

  She infused the three-foot length of sharpened metal that was mounted in her arbalest with her power. The more power there was in it, the less it was affected by the natural laws of the universe. Focusing more power into an object meant gravity, air resistance and general physics held less and less sway over it. She could tune it, make the effect longer lived, shorter lived or bias the effects to allow for more of one element or less of another.

  She could do other things, but the primary benefit, the easiest thing to do, was making her ammunition punch through anything. It would glue itself in place on impact, if she had the effect wear off at the right time, and she was very good at timing things. She could charge the metal of her cleats so they bit into any surface, and though it was too slow to be used defensively unless her foe telegraphed their attacks, she could make her costume frictionless.

  She fired the needle through the corner of the roof just in front of her, and it passed through without resistance. It continued on to strike the rooftop below and in front of her, nestling in deep as the effect wore off, bonding on a molecular level to the material around it. The chain stretched down at a fifty degree angle, taut.

  Flechette stepped forward, onto the chain. The space between the spikes of her cleats made for a groove the chain could run through. She slid down, one foot behind the other, arbalest held behind her with the chain reeling out, a safety measure in the event she slipped or was pushed off, with the added advantage that it allowed her to control the speed of her descent.

  When she was close to the rooftop below, she cut the chain, let herself drop down. She was running the second her feet met the surface, using the momentum from her slide.

  It was tiring, constantly running, but she didn’t want to look bad in front of Shadow Stalker. She was going to spend weeks with this team, and Shadow Stalker was the only other girl present that was close to her own age. Doing double shifts of patrols, eating, showering, relaxing with her teammates, day in and day out, it would drain the life out of her if she had no friends to do it with, if she had no conversation and camaraderie.

  At least this wasn’t so different from the exercise she got on her nightly patrol back in New York. The problem was that this city was unfamiliar ground. The buildings didn’t match together well, the skyline was jarring, didn’t flow. Back home, traveling from rooftop to rooftop wasn’t much harder than running, with the use of her grappling hook to move her every minute or two. Here, it was a jerky, stilted exercise, slow, awkward, demanding use of the grappling hook for nearly every building.

  It wasn’t something she did often, but after too many steep ascents followed by steep descents, she bridged a gap to a more distant building with her chain, forming a horizontal tightrope, and ran along it.

  Shadow Stalker was waiting for her when she got to the other end. She did her best not to pant for breath.

  “Don’t you run out of chain?”

  Flechette turned, reached over her shoulder to tap her back. “Tinker teammate back home specializes in replication and cloning. Small pack back here consumes energy from a small fusion battery to create a steady supply. I’ve also got a kit back at the base that makes me a fresh stock of bolts.”

  “I could use one of those.”

  “Why’d you stop? You see something?”

  “Come.”

  Shadow Stalker led Flechette to the edge of the roof. Looking down, they could see a group of men in a loose half-circle around a middle-aged woman. The woman was backing away from the men, who were gradually closing in.

  “Why haven’t you done anything yet?!” Flechette gasped.

  “These things go smoother if the culprits are clearly committing a crime when you step in-”

  A man grabbed the woman’s wrist, and she pulled back, struggled. She screamed, attacked the man, only to get punched and knocked back on her ass, landing in the shallow water.

  “-And there we go.” Shadow Stalker leaped from the rooftop, falling at a normal speed, slowing to an almost gentle floating descent when she was partway down.

  You only need to wait like that if you’re going to be violent, Flechette thought to herself. Why? When she has the tranquilizer bolts?

  And Shadow Stalker had neglected to inform command. Flechette reached for her ear, where an earbud was nestled in the canal. She squeezed it twice. “Console, woman under attack by twelve or so ordinaries. Shadow Stalker and Flechette stepping in.”

  “Acknowledged,” a voice in her ear responded, “Good luck.”

  She fired a bolt into the corner of the rooftop, then jumped, rappelling down.

  Shadow Stalker was already engaged by the time Flechette arrived at the fight. In a matter of heartbeats, Shadow Stalker answered Flechette’s unspoken questions.

  The other heroine didn’t flinch as one of the men swung a baseball bat at her – the weapon passed harmlessly through her head. In response, she stepped back, materialized from her shadow state, raised a crossbow and shot him in the side of the neck. A fraction of a second after the glass arrow stuck in her target’s neck, Shadow Stalker stepped forward again, driving her armored elbow up at an angle at the spot where the bolt had struck home. Glass shattered and the combination needle-arrowhead was violently dislodged. The man went tumbled with a splash, going limp before he hit the water. The side of his neck and the corner of his jaw were a bloody mess of cuts and embedded broken glass.

  Shadow Stalker wheeled around, then simultaneously slammed the top of her right crossbow into her left forearm and her left crossbow into her right arm. There was a barely audible click as cartridges loaded into the top of each crossbow. She extended her arms to fire at the two of the men closest to the woman. They dropped on their backs in the water, splashing.

  Realizing what they were up against, the group began to scatter. Flechette raised her arbalest, shot one bolt so it struck a wall just in front of one man’s throat. Still running, he ran headlong into it, clotheslined himself, and fell over, gasping and gurgling.

  She spared a glance to double check he wasn’t in a position to drown, which very nearly cost her. One of the thugs turned to attack her, drawing a gun, but she had a bolt loaded and fired off before he could aim it, spearing through the gun’s barrel and out the back, to strike a wall. She loaded another bolt even as she was already pulling the trigger to fire it, so it was sent out an eye-blink after it was in place. The shaft of metal struck the thug through the crotch of his sagging jeans, pinning them to the wall he was backing up to. He didn’t scream, so he clearly wasn’t well endowed enough to get hit anywhere important. Flechette wasn’t exactly an expert -or even a novice- in that sort of thing, but she was ninety-nine percent sure that men didn’t dangle nearly to their knees.

  Made lightweight by her power, Shadow Stalker leaped to the nearest wall, then vaulted herself off, careening dir
ectly toward three of the retreating men. As she landed atop the one in the front, she dropped out of her shadow form, returning to her normal weight. Planting her feet on his shoulder blades, she combined the force of her weight and her momentum with a downward kick of both feet, driving him into the water, hard. She went shadowy a half second later, becoming almost invisible in the gloom of the empty lot, effortlessly reorienting her now lightweight body to land on her feet.

  Both of the men behind Shadow Stalker attacked her, one swiping a knife at her, the other kicking for the small of her back. Smoky, dark flickers appeared where limbs and weapons passed through her.

  Almost casually, she holstered her crossbows, then straightened up. A flurry of other attacks passed through her.

  One man hesitated, seeing the futility of what they were doing, and Shadow Stalker took the opportunity to drop the shadow state. She leaned out of the way of one desperate punch from the other man, then grabbed him. She seized him by the shirt-front, pulled him forward with a hard tug on his collar and a counterclockwise turn of her body, then brought her right knee into his ribs. He fell with a splash.

  Metal kneepad, Flechette noted. That’s going to hurt.

  The other man attacked, but Shadow Stalker went shadowy just long enough for his knife to pass through her, then slammed her metal mask into his face.

  While he swayed back, stunned, blood streaming from his nose, she reached out and grabbed him by the lower jaw, her fingers digging into the bottom of his mouth. Instinctively, desperately, he bit down, hard, but the construction of the girl’s gauntlets was good enough to safeguard her fingers. She used her grip to pull him to one side as she’d just done with his compatriot, helped by a swift kick to the side of one leg. Rather than use her knee to deliver the telling blow, she brought the heel of her free hand against the gap between the man’s skull and his jaw. He screamed, crumpled toward the ground, his hands moving to where the strike had hit.

  Shadow Stalker waited a moment before letting go, forcing him to twist and squeal in agony before she let him finish collapsing.