Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Shadow Stalker was already running toward us. She entered her shadow state to leap forward, interjecting herself between us and him before going solid. There was no grace in her movement as she threw herself at him, no particular technique she employed. They slammed into one another, and she went limp, her body getting tangled up in his legs as he trampled her to the ground.

  A short distance from us, Regent fell to one knee, grunting slightly. A backfire? Or something else?

  More out of an attempt to minimize the damage to Shadow Stalker than actually being bowled over, Weld fell. I did as Tattletale had done before, and struck Weld with the metal of my gun’s barrel. As I’d hoped, he was still hot enough that the gun bonded to the metal of his body, I could help to hamper his movements. Rather than hit him in the face, I struck him across one arm, so the gun made contact with both his forearm, where the hook-hand started, and his bicep. My hope was that it would limit his range of movement.

  Tattletale, Weld and I hurried to back away as he began to climb to his feet, Tattletale recovering her lightning gun. I could see her debate striking him again, but she seemed to decide it would be better to keep her distance and hold on to it.

  I could see Shadow Stalker materialize behind Weld, with Bitch approaching from the other end of the hallway. One of the dogs, the setter whose name I couldn’t quite remember, had climbed to her feet to join Bitch. Grue was still out of action.

  Weld started laughing, the noise just a little off, coming from someone who I suspected didn’t even have to breathe.

  Tattletale caught some meaning in his laughter a second before Regent did. Tattletale, Regent and Shadow Stalker all simultaneously turned toward the front of the building. Regent and his puppet uttered a whispered “Oh shit” in unison.

  The floodwater and moisture were stirred into an whirlwind flurry around the metal frame by turbines and jets, pushing water and debris a distance away as it set down. As the engines turned off, the water slopped back into place, lapping around four metal legs.

  It was squat, the frame low to the ground, with a snakelike head, and a segmented, sinous body. It had four legs and a long tail that trailed on the ground in a zig-zagging shape, segmented much as the body had been. It would have been intimidating enough on its own, but the four engines that were mounted on its upper body, extending out of each of its shoulders in two places, were some combination of a weapons array and a propulsion system. They bristled with turrets and missiles. It opened its mouth briefly to vent off some vapor and I could see more weapons contained within. Foremost among them was some kind of massive cannon.

  That explained why Dragon had been so quiet. When she’d talked about reinforcements, Dragon had been talking about herself.

  “Okay,” Tattletale spoke as she backed up, moving her gun to point it at Weld, then Dragon and then back to Weld again. “Good news, that’s a model Dragon designed for speed, meant to get places fast. Like, say, if she wanted to get an armored suit from Toronto to Brockton Bay to personally take a hand in dealing with a group of teenage villains. It’s not really that serious a combat model.”

  I looked at the weapons that bristled from Dragon’s shoulders. If I didn’t know Tattletale’s power, I wasn’t sure I’d believe her.

  “Well, that’s good,” Regent replied, “Except it can still totally kick our asses.”

  Tattletale didn’t disagree. “Best tinker in the world? Probably.”

  I glanced behind us, where Weld was standing with excruciating slowness. He was already cooling off. The dog by Bitch’s side was growling, now.

  Tattletale continued, “The bad news is that the Protectorate is about a minute away, Grue’s still out of action, and there’s pretty much no chance we’re going to get out of here before then.”

  10.05

  The four engines mounted on the shoulders of Dragon’s armor shifted position, each aiming at a different point within the lobby. Tattletale was the first of us to turn and run, the rest of us moving to follow as Dragon opened fire.

  All in all, Dragon unloaded four streams of containment foam into the lobby, each of the shoulder mounted turrets gushing like firehoses. Only flecks of the spray struck us, but they expanded into blobs of foam the size of golf balls and softballs. Each blob was tacky, sticky, and any attempt to wipe it away just smeared it and exposed more surface area to the air, making it expand more.

  If we’d started running a fraction of a second later, we might have been screwed.

  Weld moved to block our retreat, but Shadow Stalker stepped up to fight him with one of the dogs, Bentley, joining her. It made for a pretty effective combination, as Weld couldn’t swing hard enough to hurt the dog without risking hurting his teammate. The way Regent was having Shadow Stalker fight, there was no self preservation or defense, which worked out to being a more effective combat style than anything else, in its own way. I was pretty sure Weld had never fought someone who was actively trying to get hit.

  I’d been drawing my bugs closer to the building since we arrived, and I brought them into the fray as Dragon continued to lock down the lobby with the spray. The first tactic I tried was blocking the spray with the bugs. I didn’t intend to stop the spray, exactly, but I hoped that I could cause the bugs to catch it & drop down atop Dragon, sticking to her. It didn’t work – the spray was too strong, and the bugs were blasted much too far away. Only one or two landed on her, and even then, I doubted the positions were that ideal.

  Instead, I adjusted my tactics. The idea was the same, but I didn’t want to sacrifice bugs for the purpose of clogging her systems or blocking her guns if it would be that ineffective. I gathered some bugs on anything that looked like a sensor – glass panes or openings in the armored vehicle, and I set the rest to gathering on the shattered glass that littered the floor of the lobby. The feet of the insects and arachnids had setae, or small hairs, which branched further into setules. These fibers, in turn, harnessed Van der Waals forces to cling even to surfaces as slick as glass.

  I’d been reading up.

  I didn’t use this grip to stick to the surface, but instead employed it to collectively lift and pick up the glass. Six or seven bugs could lift a decent-sized piece of glass if they were on the ground, while anywhere from twelve to thirty could fly with one if I managed it right.

  I had a few hundred to employ, with more still arriving.

  With this glass, I did my best to catch and block the outlying flecks and drips of spray as it flew through the air, at the periphery of the streams.

  The spray knocked some pieces of glass from the air, and struck some bugs, causing the group to lose their collective grip and drop the glass. That was to be expected. Others, though, caught the foam on one of the flat panes of the glass. As more bugs rose with the glass between them, I organized them into loose walls and barriers, to maximize the area they were catching and to overlap so that less bugs were exposed to incoming spray.

  “She’s got a disadvantage,” Tattletale spoke, her voice low, “This suit is meant to fly to serious crises at a moment’s notice, deal with dangerous foes. She’s packing too many lethal weapons.”

  “That’s a disadvantage?” Regent asked.

  “She’s not about to kill us. Bad PR, especially for a notable hero traveling into another country to fight virtual unknowns like us. So we only have to worry about her nonlethal weaponry, and she doesn’t have many.”

  I nodded acknowledgement, but my focus was elsewhere. As I judged that enough bugs had caught the foam on one pane of their individual pieces of glass, I directed them to carry the glass down to Dragon. As I positioned the bugs, the glass stuck to lenses, vents of hot air, vents where air was rushing in, and the smaller joints near segmented areas.

  Dragon didn’t seem to notice or care.

  “Can she see me?” Imp asked.

  Tattletale started to speak, but stopped when one of the streams changed direction to spray closer to us, forcing us to retreat in a hurry. I glanced at the gift
shop. Would it be a good idea to retreat in there? The walls were glass, which was both good and bad in that both Dragon and our group could break through it. The problem was that we risked being trapped if we headed in there.

  “No way she got here this fast,” Tattletale spoke, “She’s based in British Columbia, on the other side of the continent. This has to be remotely controlled, like the one she used to fight Leviathan, which means the only eyes on you are digital, and-”

  “She’s not,” Regent interrupted.

  “What?” Tattletale asked him.

  “There’s someone in there, I tried using my power on her, experimenting, and I felt some kind of nervous system. Too much material between me and it for me to do anything with it, and I wouldn’t really try it while I’m controlling Shadow Stalker anyways. I’d probably backfire.”

  Shadow Stalker was still fighting Weld. As Dragon turned a stream toward them, Weld reacted fast enough that I suspected he had some line of communication to her. He backed out of the way, and Shadow Stalker and the dog both moved in the other direction, with a stream splashing where they had been brawling a second before, blossoming into a pile of foam as tall as they were, separating the two groups of combatants.

  Most of my first wave of bugs had either been shot out of the sky by errant bits of spray or had placed their initial pieces of glass and were going back for more. This wasn’t a K.O. hit, and Dragon was too good to let something this minor stop her, however it might delay or hamper her. The real issue was that this was too slow, and we were on a tight time limit. Less than a minute, and the Protectorate would arrive. Their team was smaller with recent deaths and Armsmaster’s ‘retirement’, and I hadn’t heard about any new recruits.

  Then again, I hadn’t heard about the Ward’s new recruits, and here Weld was, being annoyingly persistent. I was assuming he was the new leader, given his tone with Shadow Stalker. I wondered if being ridiculously tenacious was a job requirement for being in charge of the Wards. It made sense to have a commander who wouldn’t be removed from the field by an errant attack. You wanted someone who would stay in the thick of it for the whole fight.

  The gift shop jutted out from the wall of the lobby some, the glass panes arranged to showcase more of the pictures, action figures and memorabilia with three broad windows than they might with one. This layout gave us some cover from Dragon’s attacks. Even when the force of the spray served to break the windows, the expansion of the foam at the edges of the frame soon blocked the worst of it off. If anything, it was closing the windows off. Only the pane of glass facing us was left unbroken and largely free of foam.

  Sensing this, Dragon started to advance further into the lobby. Her broad, mechanical feet began hissing with vapor, and the goo my ground-borne bugs were hauling towards her began to run, losing its consistency and stickiness. She set one foot down directly on a pile of foam, and lifted it up again with no difficulty. It was clear: the foam wouldn’t hamper her.

  “So she’s piloting that thing, then?” Imp asked. “My power works on her?”

  “We can’t be sure,” Tattletale spoke, “Don’t risk it.”

  Dragon advanced another step, circling our relative cover from the window to spray inches closer to us. The way it was piling up, there would be no way to go over it, and the route we had available for going around the far end of it was rapidly closing. We were getting hemmed in, our backs to the wall by the window.

  “Imp!” Tattletale shouted, “No!”

  I looked at her, confused, but I didn’t have time to figure it out. A flare of orange light caught my attention. Dragon’s mouth had opened wide, and she was spewing something like an ignited accelerant into the lobby. With this fluid, she drew a three-foot wide line of flame onto the lobby floor, stretching from just below her to the stairwell door by the front desk. She’d cut off our escape route.

  Weld leaped into and through the flame, his hook hands swinging wildly. Some of the accelerant had landed on him, making him burn, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  He turned ninety degrees and lunged forward in response to something I couldn’t see or hear, then swept his hooks out in a frenzied series of blind attacks. On the third swing I saw Imp duck beneath the attack, then stumble back out of his reach, towards us.

  “The fucking fuck!?” she shouted.

  “Dragon can see you, you twit, and she’s relaying directions to Weld!” Tattletale shouted at our new member, “And what the hell were you hoping to accomplish over there!?”

  “I could’ve figured something out,” Imp pouted.

  Tattletale didn’t have a response to that. Instead, she hauled her gun up and then fired a short burst at Weld. He backed up into the wall of flame, oddly enough, and Tattletale stopped firing.

  Two of Dragon’s shoulder turrets were now being set to the task of controlling the flame and keeping it from spreading across the lobby, to the front desk or up to the ceiling. Twin jets of chemical spray kept the fire limited to the areas Dragon wanted it.

  “Doesn’t she care about property damage?” I asked.

  “She prefers to keep her data secure and pay out of her own pocket for any damage. Betting this place is slated for some major renovations anyways, given the state of things,” Tattletale explained. The foam was inching closer to us as Dragon prowled further into the lobby.

  More of my bugs set sticky pieces of glass down on top of lenses and sensors. That was apparently enough for Dragon, because she stopped spraying the foam altogether and started using the two turrets that weren’t dedicated to fire management to deploying the same vapor that shrouded her legs. It surrounded her, and the work I’d done to stick things to her began to come apart as the foam turned runny.

  A wave of darkness swept over her. Grue was awake, and had formed a loose group with Shadow Stalker and the dogs. All but one of the dogs were normal sized, now, with no sign or trace of their mutations.

  They still faced the hurdle of passing by Weld, but a blast of darkness and an abrupt change of direction faked out the young hero, letting Grue slip by.

  “Dragon’s here!?” he shouted, aghast.

  “Yeah! But we got the stuff, had to wait for you!”

  “Go through the gift shop, We’ll meet you outside!” He charged right behind the spot where Dragon was still within the cloud of darkness, and out the front door. Shadow Stalker simply passed through Weld and bolted for the door, running faster than the Ward’s leader could, while the smallest dogs stayed just out of his reach, bolting after Grue. Bentley, the only dog currently under the effects of Bitch’s power, a little beaten and battered, came running towards us, far, far too eager for something that large and strong.

  Bitch grabbed his collar before he could leap up to greet her, redirected his momentum, then wrenched him toward the window. “Go!” she shouted, pointing.

  Bentley eagerly plowed through the remaining display window, knocking over DVD racks as he landed in the shop. We followed him in.

  The shop had everything cape related, from movies showcasing individual members of the teams to books, magazines, figurines, toys and posters. The layout of the shop made it awkward as a battlefield. The shelves, racks, stands and display cases forced visitors into a winding path as they navigated the shop.

  The window looking out on the street was smaller than the display windows, and was covered by metal bars. Tattletale began unloading the lightning cannon on the bars.

  Dragon lunged out of the darkness, then spotted us, her shoulder turrets orienting in our direction. We ducked behind a heavy wooden magazine stand filled with cape magazines and tourism pamphlets as Dragon opened fire with two streams of containment foam.

  Tattletale maintained the electrical assault on the bars even as she joined us in taking cover with her back to the magazine stand. The gun she was holding began to whine, with a pitch so high I could barely hear it. Bentley reacted, though, turning his head one way, and then the other. It made Bitch’s job of holding his collar and ensurin
g he stayed behind cover twice as difficult.

  The bolts holding the bars to the window frame melted before the bars themselves did. One side swung free, then the entire assembly dropped down on top of a bookshelf.

  The entire room shuddered as Dragon forced her way through the display window. One gigantic metal talon slammed down on the bookshelf, annihilating most of our cover, and we scrambled to find shelter behind the remaining stands. Her back legs began working their way towards us, the front of her body staying stationary. This made her back arch, and her head and shoulder mounted turrets gradually shifted to point downward. It would be seconds before she was spraying the foam down from directly above us.

  The whine of Tattletale’s gun reached a crescendo, and a blindingly bright arc of electricity flew from the side of the barrel to skip along the floor. I worried it would ignite something, but it winked out before it could.

  Tattletale lunged for the shelf next to the magazines, grabbing a head-and-torso model of Miss Militia. She jammed it in between the trigger and the trigger guard of her gun, forcing the trigger into a depressed position. Then she lobbed the setup over the back of the shattered bookshelf. The lightning licked the wall and the ceiling before the gun crashed to the floor. Dragon lurched back to get away from it.

  “Go!” Tattletale shouted, setting her feet below her, then leaping between the twin streams of foam that Dragon turned toward us. She came only an inch shy of making contact with the heap of foam that Dragon had created.

  Dragon heaved herself over and beyond the electrical surge the gun was still pumping out, chasing Tattletale, swiping with one mechanical claw. I got the sense she was pulling her punches to avoid murdering my teammate, because the attack was slow. Tattletale slipped past, stepping onto the bookshelf to clear the window. Or maybe it had something to do with the bugs I had gathered on her sensors.

  With Tattletale’s escape, Bitch, Imp, Regent, and I were left in the gift shop. Dragon’s lunge for Tattletale had put her directly in our path to the window, and an uneven pile of containment foam surrounded her, in the middle of the room.