Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Azazel was taking the long way around the building, heading into the same storefront I’d ridden Bentley through. It wasn’t huge, but it was big, and its progress was agonizingly slow.

  I’d been on my hands and knees for ten seconds, maybe twenty, but already my body was feeling the strain, screaming at me to change position. A crease on the inside of one of my kneepads was digging against the bone of my kneecap. The branches that extended around me might hold me, but they might not, either.

  And there was nobody even close by. If this was the movies, it would have been an opportune time for Tattletale to make her move, but we’d already been that fortunate once, with Imp forcing Piggot to order a standby. I couldn’t hope for a second lucky save.

  Azazel was moving through the store now. It was a minute away, as it carefully planted its feet to avoid crushing store merchandise. I wanted to scream at it to move faster, that I was afraid my hand would lose traction on the dusty tile and slip into the disintegration effect. I could lose a limb like that, or belly-flop onto the blur beneath me, bisecting myself.

  Why hadn’t it cut me when it grew? Because whatever guided the growth kept it from tearing up the surrounding material. It was why the Halberd and dagger hadn’t been destroyed by the growth of the disintegration cloud around them, why the growing ‘hedges’ of the stuff hadn’t cut out sections of building.

  I wasn’t in immediate danger, besides the obvious, so I decided to try something.

  “I’m going to fall!” I screamed.

  I could sense Azazel lunging forward, crushing a store display as it hurried to the opening, its mouth opening. It directed a blast of superheated air at the ground, so it cut through the lowest portion of the disintegration hedge, clearing the area beneath and around me. I winced at the heat of it, but took it for what it was.

  “You may lie down but do not try to move from your current location, Skitter,” the machine spoke. It was the same voice as the armbands and drones, but deeper. ”Do not stand or make dramatic movements or you may be harmed.”

  The message delivered, Azazel began spraying Bentley down with containment foam.

  I checked with my remaining bugs. A bubble with a four-foot radius had been cleared around me, but the larger branches still existed and a rough dome loomed over me. The area where the hot air had been vented in made for an area I might have been able to fit an arm or leg through if I felt brave, but I wouldn’t be able to crawl through, not with the branches being where they were.

  “You assholes aren’t holding back,” I muttered. When the suit didn’t respond, I glanced up. It was standing stationary above me, apparently content to have me and me alone.

  My allies were still making a run for it. The drone ship pursued Shatterbird, Regent, Imp, Barker and Biter, and some stray drones were chasing Bitch but falling behind. I positioned the relay bugs to keep in touch, but didn’t know what to communicate. That I was captured, but they shouldn’t come back for me without a plan or reinforcements? Bitch would let them know.

  No, I was stuck here, in custody.

  “So, she design you to talk?” I asked.

  Silence.

  “This statement is false,” I told it.

  “I’ll go with true. There, that was easy,” Azazel replied.

  Damn. Wouldn’t be able to shut it down with paradox. Dragon apparently had a sense of humor. The reply sounded canned, a recitation. Or she had a liking for popular culture I wasn’t aware of.

  Think, Taylor, think! What were my options? I had bugs, but they wouldn’t be able to do anything. I drew them closer, wary of the two drones that were picking themselves off the ground. Bentley was down. My weapons wouldn’t cut me free, and I was leery of trying to use my weapons on the larger branches, in case I brought something down on my head.

  Armsmaster had called it nanotechnology. It cut through anything, everything. If some dropped free and fell to the ground, would it keep falling, cutting out a bottomless pit?

  No, I needed to find and exploit weaknesses. If my costumed career had taught me two things, it was that things could always get worse, and there was always a solution. It was, in a way, why I wasn’t freaking out over the end of the world. I’d already accepted that things could get bad, and I held out hope that we could find a way out.

  I could find a way out here.

  The suit had used a heat gun. Was the nanotech vulnerable to heat? To fire? It would be ironic in a way. The growth around me resembled fire with its hues and blurry, transparent nature. Fire frozen in time. The entire scene made for a strange picture. Azazel and its ‘fire’ weren’t moving in the slightest, and the only things that were moving were the two drones that were rotating lazily around Azazel and the clouds of dust that had been stirred by the blast of hot air.

  With my swarm, I felt around my utility compartment. Yes, I had a box of matches. I’d packed tissues in there to keep them from rattling around, like I did with my changepurse, so I’d have to use my hands to withdraw them, probably. The suit wouldn’t let me once it saw what I was doing. I wasn’t sure what the response would be, but it could range from blasting me with containment foam the second the fire ate at the nanotech to hitting me with that superheated air to blow me into the side of the dome, vaporizing me.

  Had to deal with Azazel first. I looked up at the reptilian face with glowing red eyes. I could see the snakelike neck, the human-ish shoulders and arms. It looked more like a demon than a dragon, from this perspective.

  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.“

&nbs
p; “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.”

  “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.�
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  “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.”