Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Rime was second in command, wasn’t she? Or was it Prism?

  Rime would be more receptive to listening, either way. I used my bugs to speak to her. “Command center evacuated. Can relax front line if you need to.”

  She didn’t respond to me, but I could make out her orders as she shouted the words, “Fall back! Stagger the retreat!”

  I exhaled slowly.

  “You’ve done your duty. Go to your friend. Figure out what’s going on,” Arbiter said.

  I nodded and took off.

  Through my bugs, I spoke to Tecton, “Back shortly.“

  He mumbled something I couldn’t make out. It might have been ‘okay’.

  As I got more distance, I felt safe to withdraw the wings again. I picked up in speed, putting Behemoth and the fighting behind me.

  I found a temple with wounded inside. The exterior was opulent, the interior doubly so. Now it was a triage area. There were more burns here, crushed limbs, people coughing violently. It wasn’t damage suffered from direct confrontation with Behemoth. It was secondary damage, taken from the fires and smoke of burning buildings.

  And inside one curtained area, there were the wounded capes. I approached, folding the wings away and moving forward with antigrav and the occasional touch of foot against ground to propel myself forward further.

  I stopped by Tattletale’s bedside. I’d found her within instants of the temple falling in my range. Her lips moved as she recognized me, but no sound came out. My eyes moved to the tube sticking out of her throat.

  “You really gotta stop doing this,” I said.

  She only grinned. She reached over to the bedside table and retrieved a pen and notepad. Her grin fell from her face as she wrote something, then tore the page free, handing it to me.

  he’s going easy on us. all Endbringers are. but Behemoth holding back, even from moment he arrive. taking more hits than he should.

  “We already knew that they’re holding back for some reason,” I said. “The way they space out attacks, they could accelerate the timetable or coordinate their strikes if they wanted to fuck us over.”

  Another note:

  they want to lose I think. set themselves up to fail. but not fail so bad they risk dying. levi was after something, noelle I think. but why didn’t he show up closer to downtown?

  “I don’t know,” I said. I felt a little chilled at the idea that this was the Endbringers pulling their punches.

  big b wants something. not at india gate. somewhere past it. why not come up right underneath it?

  “I don’t know,” I repeated myself. “It doesn’t matter.”

  matters. looked at past attacks. pattern. small pattern. behe attacks nuclear reactor, appears some distance away. attacks birdcage, appears in rockies, no sign he was close or beneath cage. pattern says he wouldn’t emerge this close if he just wanted to attack india gate. He attacking something north of it.

  “Just tell me, is there anything I can do?”

  I was trying to find his target. accord was trying to find way to stop him, coordinate counteroffense. accord dead, I useless. get me computer? maybe I can help still. Ppl here not helping. scared of me.

  Accord was dead? What did that spell for the Undersider-Ambassador alliance?

  No. I couldn’t let myself get distracted. There were more immediate concerns.

  “Computers are probably down,” I said. “I think there’s too much electromagnetic energy, no cell towers, no radio, no internet. Armbands aren’t working, and I’d expect them to be the last thing to stop working.”

  She spent an inordinate amount of time writing the next message.

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other while I waited for her to finish, then accepted the note and read it.

  FUCK

  Each letter had been traced over several times, and the entire thing had been underlined twice.

  I glanced at her, and she was scowling, already writing the next message.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “You’re a distance away from the fighting, maybe a phone works.”

  But she was already handing me the next piece of paper.

  you go. find it. find his objective.

  “There’s other capes better for that than me.”

  get help then. but you can use swarm. search. we win this by denying him his target.

  I frowned, but I didn’t refuse her. I started to leave, then hesitated, turning back to her. I opened my mouth to speak, then saw the note.

  go already. I ok. I get healer another day. not worried.

  And I was gone, flying over the heads of the wounded as I made my way to the front door.

  The availability of healing made for an interesting, if ugly, dynamic. Capes like Tattletale, capes like me could be reckless, we’d get our faces slashed open, our backs broken, our throats severed, blinded and burned, and we’d get mended back to a near-pristine condition. Tattletale still had faint scars at the corners of her mouth, regenerated by Brian after his second trigger event, but she’d mended almost to full. I’d had injuries of a much more life-altering scale undone by Panacea and Scapegoat.

  If we died, we were dead, no question, unless I gave consideration to Alexandria’s apparent resurrection. But an injury, no matter how grave? That was something that could be remedied, it lent a feeling of invulnerability, an image of invulnerability. So we continued being reckless, and we would continue to be reckless until something finally killed us off.

  Was there a way to break that pattern? Could I afford to? My ability to throw myself headlong into a dangerous situation was part of the reason for my success.

  I looped back towards the main confrontation, finding the thinkers I’d helped off the rooftop. Some were moving to assist allies, others were fleeing. One pocket, at a glance, seemed to be trying to form a second command center.

  I moved towards the cluster of them.

  Two Indian capes, one Caucasian.

  “English?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the Caucasian said. “Just me.”

  “Trying to enlist help. Names and powers?”

  “Kismet, balance thinker,” the Caucasian said. He wore a white robe with a hard, faceless mask that had only slits for the eyes.

  “And the other two?”

  “As far as I can tell, Fathom and Particulate. Best translations I can give. My Punjabi isn’t strong.”

  “Their powers?” I asked, with a restrained patience.

  “Displaces people or things to another dimension, filled with water, brings them back. Particulate’s a dust tinker.”

  What the fuck is a dust tinker? Or a balance thinker, for that matter?“Okay, I’m going to find others,” I said.

  “Wait, what’s the project?”

  “A mission. Finding whatever it is that Behemoth wants.”

  “We’ve got others on that already.”

  “Nobody’s reported back,” I said, “Or at least, nobody’s formed a defensive line or put safeguards in place.”

  “You’re sure he’s after something? They’ve attacked cities just to kill people before, and this is a dense population center.”

  “He’s after something,” I said. “He’s got a direction, and a friend told me he’s targeting a point beyond where the heroes are searching.”

  “We’ll help look,” he said. He rattled off a few lines of Punjabi to the capes in his company. One of them, Particulate, I took it, removed what looked like a fat smart phone from one pocket. He peered at it. Some sort of scanning instrument.

  “Hey, either of you have a phone?” I asked.

  Kismet nodded, then handed me the phone.

  “Can I keep it?” I asked. “I can get it back to you later, probably.”

  He made an exasperated noise. “I thought you wanted to make a call, not keep it.”

  “It’d be for a good cause,” I promised.

  He sighed, “Take it, then.”

  I wound silk around it and then had bugs carry it o
ff in Tattletale’s direction.

  “You think it’s a cache of nuclear weapons, or what?” Kismet asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Go look, towards India Gate. I’m going to round up others.”

  “On it,” he said, before speaking another line of Punjabi. “And kid?”

  I hesitated in mid-air.

  “Thanks, for the escape route from that rooftop.”

  I didn’t respond, taking off. Rude, maybe, but taking the time to respond was stupid, when there was this much going on. Making me wait while he thanked me was similarly dumb.

  I waited until the phone reached Tattletale’s hands, then drew closer to the fighting, and the capes who were closer to the battlefront. When Rime was in my power’s reach, I contacted her.

  “Tattletale thinks she has a lead on Behemoth’s objective. Mobilizing thinkers to find it.“

  I was nearly drowned out by the chaos of the fighting. Behemoth was standing partially inside a building, and it was blazing, pieces of it falling down with every heavy impact the heroes delivered.

  “Say again,” she said.

  I repeated myself, speaking the words aloud under my breath, to gauge the proper way to form the sounds with my swarm.

  “Good,” she said. And that was all. She was fighting again, trying to freeze the building so Behemoth was encased.

  I found two more thinkers and gave them directions. We’d search the area beyond the Rajpath.

  Behemoth generated a shockwave, and I could sense the heroes reacting to it. The only cover here was cover heroes like Golem were creating, and the concussive shock traveled through the air, knocking capes off their feet or out of the air.

  I grit my teeth and pressed my back to a building as it rolled past me, fell over at the impact.

  The Endbringer strode forward, using the momentary break in the attack to cover more ground. Unfortunate capes who’d been pushing their luck were left trying to run for cover, only to be caught within his kill aura.

  Rachel rescued one or two, though the heroes might have debated the nature of the rescue. Her dogs seized people in their mouths, running, dropping them at a safe distance, before moving in to retrieve more people. Some of the rescued individuals were left slowly climbing to their feet, no doubt bruised from the dog’s teeth and dripping with drool.

  One dog, a person in its mouth, was struck by a bolt of lightning. It fell, sprawling, then slowly climbed to its feet. I could tell with my bugs, that the person in its mouth was no longer alive. Still, it dutifully carried the body to safety and deposited it on the ground, before limping back towards the battle.

  I belatedly remembered to pay attention to my team. Tecton was busy erecting barriers, raising the earth in shelves with his piledrivers. Annex was reinforcing everything, fixing other people’s work, providing loose cover for ranged heroes to hide behind, and delaying collapses. Powerful.

  Grace, using her strength to carry the wounded. Wanton was venturing into more dangerous ground with the safety of his telekinetic body, returning to human form to help the wounded and trapped, then retreating with the same form, moving on to the next person. Cuff was helping a tinker.

  Golem was forming barriers, limiting the movements of Behemoth’s legs, and shoring up the building the Endbringer was wading through.

  The constructions weren’t doing enough. We needed to change tactics now that this wasn’t working, sort of like the Endbringers did. If not constructions, then maybe destructions.

  “Tecton, pits. Have Annex cover them,” I ordered. “Think controlled collapses.“

  I couldn’t make out his response. I hoped that didn’t mean he couldn’t make out my statements.

  “You’re in charge until I get back. I have other orders,” I added.

  I returned to collecting thinkers and other stray capes, taking only a minute before heading for our destination.

  There were heroes and PRT officials at India Gate, and lined up across the Rajpath. A handful of thinkers and tinkers were here. Not ones I’d sent, but official ones, directed to scan and search for whatever Behemoth might be after.

  “Search north,” I communicated, sending moths and butterflies to pass on the message. I didn’t wait to see if they’d listen. I kept moving.

  I zig-zagged across the landscape, scanning every surface with my bugs, as the fighting continued in the distance. Behemoth wasn’t quite visible from this vantage point, but the cloud of smoke and the lightning suggested it wouldn’t be long.

  How many capes had he killed? How many more would die?

  I crossed paths with Particulate, who had apparently been filled in by Kismet. He handed me one of the scanning devices, and I took off.

  Damn tinkers. Their stuff was making life so complicated, now. Too many things to keep track of. Antigrav, propulsion, sensing things with my bugs, paying attention to what I was sensing with my bugs, coordinating people, with sectors for them to cover, and now tracking the stuff with the scanner.

  Not that it was impossible. I was managing everything but the bugspeak without a problem.

  The scanner showed me only gibberish at first, with sixteen bars divided into eight individual pieces, each of which could be any number of colors. Each rose and fell as I moved and as I turned the scanner. Moving past Particulate, I noted that the rise and fall of the bars was linked to my relation to his scanner.

  We were triangulating. Or did we not have a third? Kismet was somewhere out of my range, at present, as was Fathom, so I couldn’t be sure.

  The bars rose as I pointed in Behemoth’s direction, a mix of blues, greens, yellows and reds. Was it tracking energy?

  I turned away, and found another bump, almost all white, the rest yellow. Nothing tracked in any significant quantity at Behemoth’s location.

  It was something. I circled around until the bars reached a peak, every single one of them topping the charts.

  Nothing. I used my power, but I couldn’t find anything more complex than a desktop computer.

  Then it adjusted. The bars each dropped until they were only four or five high.

  Was Particulate doing something on his end?

  It dawned on me, as I tried to narrow down our target, that this was big. Something that topped the basic readings just by being within a mile of it.

  And I found it. My bugs could sense an underground chamber. Concrete walls, impenetrable to earthworms, and no obvious entrance. I looped back to communicate to the others. The English-speakers, anyways.

  Then, as the faster and the closer thinkers caught up with me, I approached the site.

  Particulate and Kismet joined me.

  This underground chamber was different from the one I’d seen closer to Behemoth. There was no ramp leading up, nothing to suggest an elevator.

  “Not sure how to get through,” I said.

  “Smart of them,” Kismet said.

  “I know, but it doesn’t help us.”

  Kismet said something to Particulate, and the tinker drew a gun from a holster with an excess of care.

  Then he fired. There was no beam, no projectile. There was only a corridor, three feet across, carved into the earth, and plumes of dust.

  We backed away, Kismet coughing as he caught some of it. Particulate, a tinker with a narrow, overlong bald head, said something in his language, almost musical, humorous. He glanced at me, his eyes covered by goggles, his mouth covered by a fabric that hugged every wrinkle of his lower face, as though it were a micron thick, and smiled. I could see the contours of his teeth and gums behind the strange fabric.

  “Battery,” Kismet said, stopping to cough, “is dead. Three shots. Tried two on Behemoth, didn’t work. He likes that it was useful.”

  “Damn,” I said. If they had worked…

  I didn’t waste any more time. I handed them a length of cord, then disappeared down the hole. My feet skidded on the smooth, almost glassy surface, but my flight pack gave me some lift.

  Now that I was lower, I
was free to feel out the surroundings, and mentally map out the entire complex. It took time, but the others were slow to descend to the lower corridor.

  Was there a whole undercity beneath New Delhi? Some kind of subterranean realm of corridors and rooms, large and small? Did the good and bad ‘cold’ capes accidentally dig into each other’s corridors at any point? Collapse sections of each other’s undercity?

  Geez, it wasn’t like the city wasn’t large enough already.

  I was drawing a mental picture as my bugs spread out. There were people here, but they weren’t doing anything special. Sleeping, cooking, fucking, smoking some sort of pipes… no.

  And in the midst of it, as Particulate adjusted his tracking device to further narrow the sensitivity, we closed in on a void. A part of the underground chamber my bugs couldn’t touch.

  Particulate said something, arching his eyebrows as he looked down at the scanner.

  “A lot of energy,” Kismet translated.

  “How much is a lot?” I asked.

  Particulate spoke without Kismet translating for him.

  “More than Behemoth has given off during his entire stay in New Delhi,” Kismet said.

  I stared at the little scanner and the white bars. “There’s no way in, as far as I can tell.”

  “There wasn’t a way into this base either,” Kismet said. “Maybe they have a way to enter and leave.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We know where Behemoth’s target is, even if we don’t know what it is. Let’s retreat, communicate with-”

  But Particulate was already moving, tampering with the gun that had created the corridor.

  “Stop him!” I said.

  Kismet reached over, but Particulate was already tossing the gun to the point where the floor met the wall.

  It started flashing rapidly, increasingly bright, and Particulate bolted. It was almost comical, as though he’d been taught to run by a textbook. His hands were out flat at his sides, his arms and legs bent at rigid right angles as he sprinted away, almost robotic in the movements. He shouted something in Punjabi.