Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “Behind you,” my bugs whispered. The soldier ignored them as he’d ignored the taunts and threats that were echoing through the neighborhood, without cease.

  I slipped behind him and pulled his helmet off. He drew in a breath to cry out an alarm and only choked on the flood of flying insects that flowed into his nostrils and mouth. I was already dropping the helmet, switching my baton from my injured left arm to my right hand and striking the handgun out of his hand. I had to strike him in the head five times before he collapsed, blind, gagging and choking on the bugs.

  Maybe he was faking, maybe he was unconscious. It didn’t matter. My bugs swept over him and checked every pouch and pocket. I found his keys, then hurried over to the nearest truck.

  I found the right key and started up the truck.

  I’d turned sixteen without realizing it, not long ago. It was fitting that I’d be teaching myself how to drive right about now.

  Driving slowly so I wouldn’t call too much attention to the fact that I barely knew what I was doing, I pulled away from the scene.

  ■

  I pulled over, pulled the emergency brake because I wasn’t sure how to park, then checked my satellite phone. No service. It made sense Coil would cut my lines of communication. I tossed it out the window. No use giving him a way to track me.

  We’d moved towards the beach from Coil’s place. It made sense the other Undersiders would be heading north, to their individual lairs.

  I was struck by an ugly connection between two thoughts. Calvert had mentioned he had other matters to attend to, and if Chariot’s teleportation device mimicked Trickster’s power, they’d had to swap something or somebody in. If he’d replaced me with a body double, he would want to stay in contact with her and help ensure things went her way with the other Undersiders.

  On the other hand, if Calvert was looking for a way to get leverage over me, my dad was one very vulnerable target that he was aware of.

  I was left to decide if I would go check on my dad or tackle the bigger, cape-related issues. It was a decision I’d had to make too many times in recent weeks.

  It would have to be the Undersiders and Dinah. I hated to admit it, but if my dad was attacked and I had the Undersiders there by my side, they could only help. If the opposite were true, my dad would hamper me.

  I disengaged the emergency brake and eased the truck into motion, fighting the urge to cough, knowing it would lead to wracking fits that forced me to stop in the middle of the street.

  I’d seen how involved Calvert’s maneuver had been at the debate. He had a grand plan, and it wasn’t necessarily the one he’d shared with us earlier. I was now a glitch in his system, threatening to unravel everything he’d put together.

  He had no reason to hold back, and he knew more about me than anyone I’d fought yet. He’d tried to strike at me directly, and I’d only barely escaped. I had little doubt he had other plans in mind, failsafes, traps and safeguards, and I had little choice but to run headlong into the thick of them.

  16.12

  Finding my teammates wasn’t hard; Calvert was telling me where they were.

  He didn’t tell me directly. No, this was more a casualty of being too careful, of putting too many secondary measures in place. He’d stationed soldiers to serve as lookouts at a wide perimeter around the Undersiders. I noticed one group, turned the truck to drive around them, and then noticed the second and third. They were three blocks away from the Undersiders, effectively surrounding my team, staggering their movements so only half were changing position at a given time.

  I wondered how much battlefield experience Calvert actually had, or if it had been too long ago to matter. Had he forgotten what it was like to actually be in pursuit of a target in the midst of a sprawling urban environment? He probably could have tripped me up a fair bit more by dropping the perimeter and leaving me to try to track down my teammates.

  No less than three radios for one squad buzzed with the noise of voices. The three soldiers picked up their radios and replied. Ok, so he was checking in with each squad. So maybe it was roughly as inconvenient as trying to find my teammates in the middle of nowhere.

  Calvert had dropped me in Genesis’ territory. It was about as far away as I could be from where I wanted to be, about ten minutes drive down Lord street and then a ways towards the water, if someone was driving quickly. I wasn’t driving quickly; I spent far too long in the wrong gear, for one thing, I was clumsy with the car’s controls and I was forced to drive even slower because the roads were treacherous. Damage to the road was hidden in the areas that were still flooded, where my bugs couldn’t necessarily see them. Other roads were slick where there was just enough water to raise the oils up from the crevices of the road’s surface to the point that tires would slip on them.

  On the plus side, driving while blind wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it would be. I was relying on my swarm, of course, but even then I figured the lack of sight would be more of an impairment.

  After noting where the squads were deployed and coming to the conclusion that Calvert was using his soldiers to track the movements of my team, I had to stop to contemplate the situation and finally got around to the coughing that had been looming for a few minutes.

  If I charged in, Calvert’s men would collapse in on me. Three or four soldiers per squad, and there had to be eight or more squads, unless Calvert wasn’t keeping troops moving in advance of the group. That made for twenty-five to fifty soldiers. That would be pretty much all of Calvert’s troops that hadn’t been at the house. I didn’t fail to note how they were equipped, either. I could sense the general shape of what would be sniper rifles and one piece of artillery that looked to be a mortar.

  Made sense that he would have had the perimeter in place to ensure Dinah didn’t slip his grasp. If she was gone, then he might have maintained their positions to keep me from reuniting with my team after I escaped from his deathtrap.

  Thing was, I had another problem here. Calvert had teleported me. I wasn’t sure how he’d locked on to me, had ditched my phone as the most obvious measure, but I was worried that they could tag me with the thing and toss me into some backup trap reserved for one of my teammates.

  All in all, I didn’t want to give the soldiers a chance to see me, radio in general coordinates and then toss me out to some remote area on the other end of the city. Knowing that his power was least effective when he didn’t have a full grasp on what was happening moment to moment was another reason to keep out of sight.

  I did want to go on the offensive. I just wasn’t sure how. If I attacked the individual squads, a check-in on Calvert’s part would reveal that someone was picking them off and they would all go on the offensive. They might even shoot to eliminate my teammates. Grue, Imp, Bitch and the dogs might have the suits or natural durability to keep them alive in the face of a hail of gunfire, but Dinah didn’t, and there was the possibility that the shots from the sniper rifles could penetrate the suits.

  Or Calvert would order his squads to fire their mortars and wipe my teammates off the map. If I assumed he had more than one mortar positioned around them, added his power into the equation to give him two sets of barrages with different target zones, I doubted they would emerge unscathed.

  That left me to wonder why he hadn’t done something similar at the house. No grenades, no mortar, no bomb laying in wait.

  Failing that, what was the trick behind the teleportation? Why hadn’t he just teleported me back after I slipped away?

  Did he want to keep me alive? Or had he actually expected me to escape? Had he looked at all my past confrontations and gauged that I could probably make it, and it was no skin off his nose if I didn’t?

  Hell, it was possible he’d used his power to help ensure I’d make it this far, to further some greater scheme.

  Whether I wanted to deal with the soldiers, get the Undersiders out of the way of those mortars or avoid falling into some greater trap laid by Calvert, I needed more informat
ion.

  The Undersiders were walking, judging solely by the speed the soldiers were adjusting their positions. I wasn’t sure where Atlas was, but I’d driven past the site where we’d picked up Dinah and he hadn’t been there. I could guess that Dinah wasn’t keen on riding the dogs, so that made sense.

  I slipped bugs into position on the soldiers to track their movements, then moved in closer, pulling the car into park and climbing out. Better to move on foot. I’d picked up masses of bugs on my slow-ish drive through the city, and I guided them as close to the soldiers as I could get them without giving myself away.

  The tint of my lenses didn’t help with the haze over my vision. Still, opening my eyes, I could see it was evening, and the city wasn’t offering much in the way of ambient light, given the inconsistent availability of power. I coupled the use of my bugs with my eyesight to try to spot the glare of flashlights or headlights, but peeks suggested that the soldiers were operating in darkness. Night vision goggles, perhaps.

  I waited until the squad nearest to me shifted to follow, noted how the squads to the north and the southeast of them were holding position, guns at the ready. Calvert would have told them I’d escaped and that they should keep an eye out. Their wariness made sense.

  Still, I was able to advance closer, following the group that was moving to follow, getting closer while keeping buildings and other obstructions between us. Not the easiest thing in the world when I had to use the presence of the bugs to estimate where their line of sight extended, but I managed to get within half a block of them, crouching behind a van. Swarms waited just around the corners.

  I wasn’t attacking, though. No, my interest was on getting close enough that I could reach my teammates with my power. Calvert had apparently stationed his men with my power’s range in mind, but he didn’t necessarily know that my power’s range extended in certain circumstances. Getting just a little closer, I could sense them, walking down the middle of the road. I drew my bugs around me, not in the shape of a person, but to mimic the curves and bumps of the truck I was kneeling beside, so my silhouette wouldn’t stand out so dramatically.

  I could sense Bitch, still on Bentley’s back as he trailed behind the rest of the group. Bastard was lying across her lap, apparently asleep.

  I sensed Grue and Imp, walking just ahead of Bitch and Bentley.

  And I sensed Dinah, walking hand in hand with a girl who shared my build, who had hair of the same length and a costume similar to my own. I didn’t want to give anything away by swarming her with bugs to sense where our costumes differed, but it was pretty damn close. She even had bugs on her costume. Some were drawn there by pheromones, and some were pinned in place. Her utility compartment differed from mine. She had a knife, longer and narrower than mine, and two guns holstered within. Some grenade canisters were tucked into the spaces by the shoulders where the short cape could cover them.

  If Calvert’s preparation of the building prior to teleporting me in hadn’t made me think his betrayal was premeditated, this certainly cinched it. Copying my costume, finding someone who fit my shape to the point that the others wouldn’t notice? Someone apparently capable of using a gun?

  Dinah was still with them. They hadn’t dropped her off, even though Calvert could have arranged something like fake parents to accept Dinah. Or maybe someone had raised that possibility and fake Skitter was taking Dinah back to ‘her’ territory to look after for a bit. The other Undersiders would leave, maybe, and Dinah would go straight back to Calvert’s possession.

  I wished I had a better sense of Calvert’s overarching plan. What would happen to the other Undersiders? What would he do with fake Skitter? He couldn’t hope to maintain the ruse for any meaningful length of time.

  There had to be a reason he hadn’t just bombed them here and erased the last of his enemies in one fell swoop. How much of the plan that he’d shared had been real?

  This situation wasn’t so different from the one I’d just escaped. There was the immediate threat, the mortars, and there was the one beyond that, with the soldiers ready to gun down my allies. Bitch could have rescued Dinah, Imp and Grue from the mortars, given a chance to run, and Grue and Imp could deal with the guns, but the biggest issue, the biggest difference in where they were now compared to where I’d been, was that they weren’t aware of the threat.

  If I could communicate with them, perhaps I could have coordinated them, managed something. But it was evening and the black and brown bodies of my bugs wouldn’t be able to spell out anything obvious against a dark background. My phone had been locked out and the presence of the false Skitter meant I couldn’t deliver a message unless it was very subtle.

  Any mistake on my part threatened to provoke an ugly situation. Calvert could order the mortar strike and teleport Dinah and false Skitter out.

  No, I didn’t think there were many options when it came to communicating with Grue. Imp? Maybe that was a better option, given her ability to disappear, meet up with me and then rejoin the others.

  Except I didn’t have an explicit strategy in mind, and I wasn’t willing to gamble that Calvert hadn’t accounted for Imp with some kind of surveillance with an electronic filter, like the screen of Dragon’s battlesuit.

  Rachel? No. I was pretty sure she couldn’t read and write well enough to follow any directions, so I couldn’t even explain anything complex without saying it aloud, and doing that would be hard, speaking through my bugs without alerting the doppleganger in their ranks.

  I could abandon them, try to find Tattletale or my dad, but Tattletale was going to be behind even more layers of security, if she was inside Coil’s underground base, and going to see my dad felt like a detour that wouldn’t do anything to address this situation.

  That left me one potential ally. I sent a ladybug to Dinah, settled it on her right hand, the one that the mock Skitter wasn’t holding.

  She glanced at it, her head turning a fraction, then moved her hand to hide it from false Skitter. I felt her clench her fist, the skin between the ladybug’s legs stretching so the legs were pulled slightly apart.

  Dinah knew that Skitter wasn’t me. There was no other reason to hide the ladybug.

  We’d never spoken. We’d never had a conversation, or even communicated through more than eye contact. Dinah had been driving my actions for weeks, now, or maybe it would be fairer to say my goal of saving her had been driving my actions. Now we were finally getting a chance to interact, and everything hinged on it.

  The bug crawled to the center of her palm, and she closed her fingers gently around it. Did Dinah have access to her power? Could she signal me? Dropping the bug? Killing it?

  I sensed the movement of the bug as she raised it to her chest, used her thumbnail to scratch at her collarbone.

  Maybe I’d pinned too many hopes on the drug-addicted preteen.

  Maybe I’d read the little signals wrong, and she didn’t realize that the Skitter next to her wasn’t me.

  Or maybe that niggling doubt that had been in the back of my mind since I’d decided I had to help Dinah had been real. It was all too possible she didn’t want to be rescued. She was dependent on the drugs, she craved them, and staying with Calvert meant she got them. In a way, I felt like that possibility was why I’d been pushing myself to save her as hard as I had, because I suspected that Dinah was trapped in more than one way. She’d been kidnapped, kept captive physically, but she was also being kept captive in other ways. I had to save her because she might not want to save herself.

  Except if she didn’t want to save herself, then this situation would be that much more difficult to manage.

  She dropped her hand to her side, let it swing a distance away, then brought it up to her chest again, scratched.

  My doppleganger noticed, said something along the lines of ‘Don’t scratch’. I caught only some sounds, was left to put the rest of it together through cadence and context. And, I thought, maybe it was easier to understand because she sounded familiar. S
he sounded much the same to the ambient bugs as I did.

  It bordered on creepy.

  The second thing I noticed was that what Dinah was doing was probably a signal. Both times, she’d touched the bug to her chest, bringing it close to her heart.

  Bringing the bug to her?

  I didn’t like the idea of that. If I was interpreting it the way I was supposed to, it seemed suicidal. Did she want me to come to where she was? If she was, was her power guiding that request, or was she still powerless and simply wanting to be rescued?

  Breaking past enemy lines without getting seen, only to… what? Make myself a mortar target alongside my teammates? Where was the advantage? What was the asset to putting myself in the thick of it?

  Calvert had to anticipate that I’d try to rescue my teammates. His soldiers wouldn’t be on guard against an outside threat like this if he didn’t. What did he expect I would do? I wouldn’t charge headlong into his soldiers. I would see them. I’d find some way around them, maybe turn some aspect of the situation to my advantage.

  There were too many possibilities when it came to ways I might leverage things. He couldn’t narrow down what I’d do because that was how I operated. I was versatile.

  Then what was the common element? I was tired, I was hurting, fighting the urge to cough, lest I inform the soldiers I was here. I couldn’t think of any solid way to tackle this situation, but in scenarios where I could, what might the common elements be?

  I’d be using my power, for one thing. Calvert couldn’t do anything about that unless he’d had Leet devise some kind of counter-weapon. It was all too possible, but I didn’t have the time to consider all the possibilities there.

  I didn’t have the time.

  The other common element, the drawback to my power, to my mode of operation, was that I wasn’t dynamic. I wasn’t a blitz hitter, in and out in a flash. I could be aggressive, impulsive, improvising on the fly, but it took me time to get my soldiers in a row, to prepare my tools and drag things to where I needed to be. Fighting Mannequin had been like that, those two long minutes of sustaining a beating while I got all the supplies and spiders to the site of our skirmish. Even escaping the house, it hadn’t been quick. I’d had to hunker down and amass enough decoys before dropping from the window.