Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  But I found myself less fixated on her than on her surroundings. Oddly enough, I could feel a different structure behind the woman, a hallway.

  I tried to speak, but couldn’t find the air. Damn this little bastard. Damn Usher for not doing something.

  “What a mess,” Satyr called out.

  Heads turned.

  The Vegas Wards had arrived, perched on top of the nearest wall. They didn’t move to help, didn’t leap to intervene. Satyr glanced at Bambina, who was struggling to free herself from the bola. There was something in his eyes.

  Were they in on it?

  “Help us!” Vantage called out. “Rime’s out, and we can’t save Weaver!”

  Satyr didn’t speak. He glanced at the ship. He couldn’t see from the angle he’d approached, but the woman inside had pulled the lever, and the door at the back was slowly closing.

  I drew out words on the side.

  Pretender in danger

  The heroes turned, eyes going wide. Satyr, Blowout and Leonid rushed forward, joined by Vantage.

  Then Usher stepped forward to help, and the August Prince choked, giving me a little slack. I sucked in a gasp for air.

  Arbiter heard, whipping around, and threw a forcefield between us. I pulled away.

  She managed to sandwich the little bastard between her forcefield and the ground. I rolled away, sitting up.

  The ramp was nearly closed by the time they arrived. Vantage slammed one hand against the door, but it was too heavily armored to give.

  “Kul-,” I gasped out.

  The woman turned and walked up to the ruined nose of the craft, and began threading wires together. She didn’t even flinch as sparks flared between them. She was measured, even patient, as she worked at fixing the panel. When she was done, she tapped something out on the broken, unlit touch panel.

  “Kulshedra, shut down,” I managed.

  “Restate request.”

  The pillar rose from the top of the box, freeing the upper part of the box’s door.

  “Kulshedra, contact Dragon,” I tried.

  “Dragon is currently unable to reply.“

  “Contact Chevalier.”

  “Calling.“

  The woman tapped out another code, and the clamps on the bottom came open, freeing the bottom.

  Yet another code typed out, and the system spoke, “Type two safety override accepted.“

  The woman in the ship struck a single button. The A.I. spoke, “Call ended.“

  “Kulshedra, call Chevalier,” I repeated.

  Nothing.

  The woman inside typed out a final code, and the door of the box opened, releasing Pretender.

  And then she spoke, and I could hear through the bugs that surrounded her. “The Doctor will see you now.”

  “Right-o,” Pretender said. “Gotta be better than the Birdcage.”

  They stepped through the gateway that led to the cool, air-conditioned hallway, and then they were gone, the butterflies in the hallway no longer in my reach.

  I felt my blood pumping, roaring in my ears. “They got him. They collected Pretender.”

  “Who?”

  “Her. The shooter’s partner. Cauldron.” I clenched my fist. “Rime’s down. We have to help her.”

  “The shooter-” Vantage started.

  “He’s gone,” Arbiter said. “Not sensing a threat. You guys go. I’ll look after Prefab and Leister, and make sure Weaver’s okay.”

  Usher nodded.

  Satyrical gestured, and most of his team joined the L.A. team members. I was left kneeling, still catching my breath. Satyr and Nix hung back, arms folded, exchanging surreptitious glances.

  Arbiter didn’t look at them as she spoke, “You hired them. Bambina’s crew. You wanted to break him out.”

  Satyr didn’t respond.

  “You were going to leave the Protectorate? You had to have been.”

  “Yeah.” It was Nix who spoke, not Satyr.

  “Just like that?”

  Nix shook her head. “It’s gone. Doomed. We lost Alexandria, we lost Legend and Eidolon. The new team doesn’t hit half as hard. Look at Rime. Taken out of action like that. Protectorate’s a shadow of what it was.”

  “She was beaten by monsters the Protectorate refuses to even classify,” I said. I coughed a little.

  “Alexandria would have managed.”

  “Alexandria worked for them,” I said.

  Nix shrugged.

  Arbiter looked up at Satyr and Nix, “If you leave, the Endbringers-”

  Nix interrupted, “We’ll still fight Endbringers. But the Protectorate was going to take Pretender from us because of how he got his powers. It’s ridiculous.”

  “He was still going to be on the team,” Arbiter said. “Just… we can’t let him be leader if he’s beholden to a group like that.”

  “It shouldn’t matter.”

  “Cauldron’s evil,” Arbiter said. “They experimented on people to get the powers Pretender has.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Satyr said. His voice was rough. “Pretender’s gone, and so are we. We’ll get our teammates and we’ll go.”

  He nudged Nix, and they turned to go.

  One Protectorate team gone.

  Arbiter dialed her phone, shifted restlessly. “Chevalier. It’s an emergency.”

  There was a long pause.

  “The Vegas team,” she said, finally. “They’ve broken ranks. There’s more, but if we’re going to arrest them, Dragon needs-”

  A pause.

  “No,” she said. “They aren’t. No. Yes. Yes, sir.”

  There was a defeated tone to her body language as she let her arm fall to one side, disconnecting the call.

  Arbiter looked from her phone to Prefab. “Dragon collapsed just before this began. She was meeting a Las Vegas Rogue.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I thought of the woman who’d been so handy with the computer. The censor, the bogeyman. They’d taken out Rime, no doubt because she could have sealed the box behind a wall of ice.

  Yet they hadn’t taken out Prefab, who could have done much the same thing.

  Every step of the way, every action perfect.

  “The Vegas heroes?” I asked.

  “He said to let them go,” she said, her voice small. “That we need them, even if they aren’t Protectorate. He’ll send people to talk to them and arrange something later.”

  I nodded, mixed emotions stewing in my midsection. It was bad, it was disappointing, to see a failure on this level, after I’d given so much up to help the Protectorate out.

  “We lost on every count,” I said.

  “Rime’s alive,” Arbiter said, looking at her phone.

  “Every other count, then,” I said.

  “There’ll be better days,” she said.

  Not like this, I thought, and it wasn’t a good thought. As nice as the feeling of rescuing civilians had been, this was an ugly idea, a pit in the depths of my stomach.

  The person I wanted to be, the person I was, reconciling them wasn’t so easy. The hero on one side, Skitter on the other.

  This has to change.

  23.03

  “Mr. Chambers? Weaver’s here to see you.”

  He called out from the opposite end of the room, “Send her in!”

  I ventured into his realm, staring around me as I entered the space that was apparently the hub of costume design and marketing for the PRT.

  The wall to my left had a map of North America. Cities had been identified, with clusters of portraits around each major city. Protectorate members on top, Wards on the bottom.

  To my right, there were glass cases showing off costume designs, old and new. A woman was inside the case, dressing a dummy.

  Further down, there was Glenn.

  Power was a funny thing. I’d seen it expressed in a number of ways, with parahumans, but the unpowered weren’t quite so flexible. There were people like Tagg, who relied on bluster and bullying, and people like Calle, with she
er confidence and a strict reliance on their own abilities in a particular field. Piggot had been something else, someone who had known how to leverage people and situations, more like Calle than anyone, but with the added advantage that she’d had the authority to call in airstrikes and requisition Dragon’s A.I. driven craft. Like Tattletale had said, Piggot wasn’t a genius, but she had her strengths.

  I’d suspected that Glenn Chambers would be more like Calle, with a touch of Tagg’s tendency to bulldoze through problems. Seeing him operating in his home territory, I wasn’t so sure that was the case.

  Glenn Chambers wore plaid pants with red and green, and a pink dress shirt, His belt bore a buckle with the PRT logo on it. His hair had changed too, parted neatly into what I assumed was ‘geek chic’, and the glasses had changed as well, with thick, round frames. An ID card hung around his neck. He didn’t fit any of those particular archetypes.

  I looked at him and the person who came to mind was Skidmark. Brockton Bay’s onetime loser villain, meth-head and drug dealer, later the head of the depraved, anarchist Merchants. It was hard to pinpoint why, at first. They were nothing alike, on an aesthetic level. Their demeanor, their status in society, their appearance or goals, there were no similarities.

  People milled around him. Twenty-something men and women, who carried coffees and portfolios, cloth and paperwork. Fat as he was, Glenn moved swiftly. He sipped a coffee, handed it back to the assistant who’d delivered it, and sent her off with a command or clarification. Men and women with portfolios were told to set up at his desk while he examined action figures in the light of the window. His pudgy hands, almost childlike, took hold of an action figure by the arm. He shook it violently, his cluster of minions backing away at the sudden flailing of his arm and the plastic figure. The arm snapped off, and the toy went sailing through the air. Someone scooped it up and brought it back to the group.

  “Go, and hurry,” Glenn said. “Tell them to fix it and cast another prototype before the run starts. These are toys, they’ll be in the hands of children and collectors both. The people who are buying these are fans. What’s it going to say if their most immediate association with Esoteric is the broken toy sitting on a shelf? It’s going to convey that he’s flimsy.”

  The action figure people fled, and Glenn approached his desk, where the portfolios had been set out. I approached, a touch lost in the midst of all of this, and nearly stumbled as another group entered the room, vacating to fill the void left by the group that was exiting.

  “Weaver, come. Look and tell me what you think.”

  I approached the desk, and the group parted to give me space. It was hard to put my finger on why, but I couldn’t help but feel like they were doing it at Glenn’s bequest and not mine.

  The massive portfolio folders were open, showing poster images of various Protectorate members. The leaders of the new teams. The images were stylized, with splashes in pale watercolor in the background, an almost sketchier appearance to the heroes. But the masks, necks and shoulders, the emblems and their characteristic tools were all done in hyper-realistic detail. Chevalier, Rime and Exalt, with backgrounds in gray, blue and yellow, respectively. There looked to be more behind them.

  “They’re good,” I said.

  “They’re crap,” Glenn countered. One finger tapped on a blossoming of yellow and red watercolors at the tip of Chevalier’s Cannonblade. “The last thing we want to convey are that things are a mess, and that’s exactly what the blobs in the background will do.”

  “I’d buy one,” I said. “If I wasn’t already a cape, anyways. Things are a mess. I don’t see how you’d convince a non-cape me otherwise.”

  Glenn sighed. “We’re treading into philosophical and hypothetical territories there. It’s a no-go.”

  He turned to one of the artists, “Something cleaner, tighter. And don’t use a side-profile of Rime. If she doesn’t want the post-effects, she’ll have to accept that her waist isn’t quite poster material.”

  The poster people disappeared, fleeing Glenn’s presence.

  I stepped into the gap, “I wanted to talk to you-”

  “One minute,” Glenn dismissed me. He turned to the group that had just arrived, “The interview?”

  “It’s good,” a young man said, handing over a print-out. “Chevalier is personable, but different from the old leaders. Fits the ‘New Protectorate’ atmosphere you described.”

  “Of course it does,” Glenn said. He skimmed the paper, turning pages. “I based it all around him. Good call on the interview’s quality. Quite good.”

  Skidmark, I thought again. Skidmark, who had built up a kind of momentum around himself, like-minded people falling into his orbit. Despite being utterly repulsive and foul-mouthed, Skidmark had charisma. People followed him. Glenn wasn’t repulsive, but he grated.

  Maybe that was part of their charisma. Maybe the natural, casual narcissism, as much as it didn’t jibe with Skidmark’s meth-mouth or Glenn’s obesity, conveyed that they were the center of the universe. Everyone wouldn’t necessarily be swept up in their delusion, but the fact that they drew in weak-willed sheep lent them a measure of clout that forced people to acknowledge them. For Skidmark, it had been depraved homeless, addicts and thugs. For Glenn, it was a cadre of college students hoping for a career in marketing, advertising or public relations within the PRT.

  Or maybe I wasn’t thinking too generously about Glenn Chambers, given how pissed I was. Maybe he wasn’t that bad.

  “Well?” he asked me, as if I was making him wait.

  I resisted the urge to react, forced myself to stay calm.

  If he was really like Skidmark, in how he surrounded himself with loyal and terrified sheep and minions, there were two ways to mount an attack. I could take the fight straight to him, like Faultline had with Skidmark, or I could strip him of his flock.

  “I’d like to speak to you in private.”

  “Impossible, I’m afraid. I’m busy enough I shouldn’t even be taking the time to talk with you,” he said. He offered me a smile, “But you’re my most interesting project.”

  “It’s a matter of courtesy,” I said. He wanted to play this on a political level? “Please.”

  Put him on the spot. Force him to play along or look bad.

  Glenn only smiled. “Isn’t it just as discourteous to interrupt me in the middle of my work, when I’m already doing you a favor by meeting you?”

  Fine. He wanted to play it that way?

  “Last night, Pretender got broken out of Dragon’s craft, our team crushed, and Rime shot. I almost died.”

  “I heard,” he said. He looked at the woman who was just arriving with his new coffee, “Kayleigh, can you go talk to Mr. Payet? He was supposed to call me in ten minutes and it’s been fifteen.”

  “Yes sir,” she said, running off.

  He either doesn’t care or he’s deflecting.

  “Your insane restrictions on powers were a big part of that, Mr. Chambers. The bad guys won, and it’s partially your fault.”

  The heads that turned my way, silent and staring, only confirmed my suspicions. The crowd of twenty-something assistants and designers around him were a defense system. Not a power, but power in general.

  “My fault? I wasn’t even there.”

  “I asked to speak to you because I wanted you to know about the damage that’s being done.”

  “Ah, this is about the butterflies.”

  “It’s about a lot more than butterflies. It’s the whole mindset. The attitude of the heroes. I’d talk to Chevalier, but he’s too busy. I’d talk to Rime, but she’s recovering from being shot three times. You’re the only other person I’ve met so far who really seems to be in a position to know what I’m talking about. Besides, as far as I can figure, image and PR seem to be at the heart of the problem.”

  “A complicated issue, something you could study for six years in college,” he said. “But you’ve figured it out after two brawls? The rumors of your intelligenc
e must be true after all.”

  “I wouldn’t make light of it. Pretender got captured. Either he’s in enemy hands, and there’s a body snatcher out there, or he’s dead. Because of a fight we could have won.” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “There’re no certainties, but come on. There’s got to be a point where the kiddie gloves come off and we actually put up a fight. I saw the Wards struggling in Brockton Bay, as they faced pressure from outside forces, me included, and serious threats. They got whittled down because, as powerful as they are, they didn’t get the chance to put up a fight. Now the rest of us are starting to face the same pressures, and the PRT isn’t learning from past mistakes.”

  “I’m trying to understand what you’re wanting to argue. Are you saying our Wards, children with powers, should take your cue? Fight more viciously? Intimidate? Be merciless?”

  “All your capes could stand to stop holding back. Wards and Protectorate both. At least in situations like this. We lost Pretender, and we didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the Vegas teams. That played a part in losing them.”

  Glenn frowned, glancing at his collection of underlings. “Everyone but Weaver, out. I hope each of you can find something to do.”

  The flock scattered.

  “You already know what happens if you speak on the subject,” Glenn called out to them, raising his voice as they got further away. “I personally know everyone you might try to leak details to. It’s not worth the risk! Discretion!”

  A moment later, they were gone. His office seemed so empty without the young professionals running around.

  “We must have a talk about which things can be said when,” Glenn said. He took a second to tidy up stray pictures on his desk.

  “I did ask if we could speak alone,” I told him.

  “And I said no. I’m much too busy, and as much as I relish our future discussions, hearing how you did what you did in Brockton Bay, the Vegas Wards are a large part of why I’m racing to provide the public with our new, upgraded Protectorate.”

  “Misdirection and deception,” I said. “You know, I do know about subtlety. I kind of ran a group that ruled a city.”

  “And I’m sure you did an excellent job,” Glenn said. “But you’re a dog in a duck pond here. You’re out of place, you don’t know the usual precautions, the customs and conventions. You gave evidence to that when you talked about the Vegas wards, something that should be kept more discreet.”