Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  Without thinking, I hauled on it, pulling it off-target. The gun hit one screen, two feet to Phir Sē’s right, at stomach level. It exploded into a swirling cloud of black dust.

  Phir Sē whirled around. He barked out a word I couldn’t understand.

  “No!” I called out.

  Phir Sē made a gesture with his hand, just as the teleporter flickered into existence. The man didn’t intersect Particulate, but appeared behind him, deftly disarming him of the grenade and pistol before flickering back out of existence. He took Particulate with him.

  “Don’t kill him,” I said.

  “You would feel… blameful?” Phir Sē asked.

  Blameful? “Guilty,” I corrected him, before I realized what I was doing.

  I could see the small smile on Phir Sē’s face, disappointed and proud and a condemnation at the same time. ”I watch you. In reflection of screen. You set him up, to put yourself in my good will.”

  Had I? Not wholly consciously. I’d set up the string, but how much of that was intentional? Was it habit, now, to have a measure on hand when dealing with any weapon?

  I focused on the swarm, focused on the cords and threads that traced the room. One in the doorway, one at each of Phir Sē’s feet, just waiting for me to finish the deal and bind him. Others extended between us, spiders poised to cut the threads or tie them, as the situation demanded.

  The passenger, or was it me, being wary?

  “I guess I did,” I said. I made the spiders cut the threads between us.

  He shook a finger at me, “I was not born yesterday. This silliness could have gotten you killed. Would have, if I did not feel need for outsider to challenge my ideas.”

  “I guess…” I said, searching for the phrase, “A gamble’s not meaningful if you’re not staking something important, right?”

  He smiled a little, and there was a slight twinkle in his eye, “Your life?”

  “I suppose,” I said. My heart was still pounding, my mouth dry, and it wasn’t just the Phir Sē thing, or the teleporter. The passenger.

  “You think. So we know where you stand, now. You are crafty, dangerous. Underhanded. You turn on an ally and use him as a pawn to express something to me.”

  “He wasn’t quite an ally,” I said. ”He helped us get inside this underground base. But he was reckless. Breaking into this chamber in the first place, preparing to attack you. A chaotic element.”

  “I do not know this ‘chaotic’ word, but I get your meaning, I think. There was no communication,” Phir Sē said. He smiled as though we shared a private joke.

  “I’m doing what I have to, to ensure we all come out of this ahead. Just like you, but I didn’t get the ability to manipulate time, or to create this sort of ‘time bomb’. I work on a smaller scale.”

  “I get the joke,” Phir Sē told me. ”It is joke? Small?”

  “Sort of,” I said, and I smiled a little in return, behind my mask. This guy was borderline unhinged, too much power in too unstable a package, and I almost liked him.

  “What is it you wish to express to me, Weaver, that you would sacrifice a pawn and risk your own life?”

  I wasn’t sure I had a response to that. I tried anyways. ”You want to hit Behemoth with your time bomb? Okay, let’s do it.”

  “Oh? You protested only minutes ago.”

  “I’m not about to change your mind, I’m not about to stop you. So let’s make it happen. We’ll let the defending heroes know what’s up, set up something-”

  “Slower. Speak slower.”

  “Let me go. We work together with the heroes.”

  “The heroes will die in minutes. Before you arrive.”

  I glanced at the screen. How bad was it? It was so hard to get a sense of how many heroes still stood. An ugly feeling gripped my chest.

  “We’ll try. Let me try. I can give you a signal. You strike then.”

  “You are asking me to have faith.”

  “Let me go, Phir Sē,” I told him. ”You said you have to stake something that matters on a gamble. Stake your doubt.”

  “I do not understand this,” he said, suddenly sounding weary. ”My English-”

  “It’s not your English; what I’m saying doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I said. I had to resist the urge to rush and hurry through the explanation. ”But your doubt, your lack of faith, it’s something safe. No disappointments, no fear things won’t work out. Risk that. Risk losing that. I did, when I became a hero.”

  “Not such a hero,” he said. ”Bargain with the madman, turn on an ally.”

  “I’m realizing I’m a pretty lousy hero,” I agreed. ”But I’m trying. I made a leap of faith. I’m asking you to as well.”

  He smiled a little, then reached forward and took my hand. He raised it, simultaneously bending over, and kissed the back of it.

  “One more,” he said.

  “One more?”

  “To wager on a gamble. A pleasant conversation I might look forward to. Gone, when you die.”

  Die?

  He spoke a word, and I tensed. I tried to pull my hand back, but he held on, my fingers wrenching painfully as I tried to get away.

  The teleporter appeared just behind me. His manifestation was followed by a gentle brush of air, as oxygen was displaced from the area his body now occupied. I could feel my heart skip a beat, the air catching in my throat.

  No pain. A second passed as I made an assessment, realized that he hadn’t impaled me with one of his limbs. Only surprise, and that vague sense of a killer instinct.

  The man’s hands settled on me.

  “Fifteen minutes, Weaver,” Phir Sē told me, releasing my hand. ”Fifteen minutes, or if the heroes cannot put up fight any longer, whichever is first.”

  And I was gone, out of the basement, planted in the midst of the battlefield. Phir Sē wasn’t even in my range. I’d made the call to work with him, and now it was set in stone. There would be no going back to change his mind, to stop him. He’d strike, guaranteed.

  Even with the filter of my mask, the smell of ozone and the heated air burned the edges of my nostrils. Acrid smoke was so thick in the air that I could taste it, breathing in through my nose.

  And Behemoth loomed in front of me, far too close for comfort, his silhouette shrouded in the smoke around him.

  I turned and activated the antigrav panels, running to help get up to speed before it could help me lift off.

  The ground abruptly tilted under my feet, a steep shelf of street and underlying rock rising in front of me, blocking my path. I managed to grab the uppermost edge with my hands, hauling myself forward enough that the flight pack could take over.

  No bugs. I’d left them behind in Phir Sē’s lair. If I’d thought about it, I might have asked for time to collect them. At the same time, I couldn’t have spared the minutes.

  Two or three thousand bugs, the only silk I had were the cords that were still attached to me, the ones I’d stretched between Phir Sē and myself and then cut. I had my taser, laughably petty in the face of Behemoth, a small canister of pepper spray, and the flight pack.

  Long odds, even at the best of it. I pressed the button on my armband, spoke into it, and got only silence in response.

  My bugs moved throughout the battlefield, and I marked every cape I came across. Shelter was scarce, and hard to make out in the smoke. Each flash of lightning marked an unfortunate cape who’d found themselves too far from cover and in Behemoth’s sights.

  In the midst of it all, I could speak and I couldn’t make myself out. It was almost like being in Grue’s darkness, before his second trigger event. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. My movements, even, were harder to judge. I felt like there was a pressure, here, as if the smoke had substance, and even Behemoth’s existence, somewhere nearby, was weighing on me. Was I tired, or was everything heavier? Or, it struck me, maybe the oxygen content in the air was lower.

  I wasn’t sure about the ramifications of that.

  So few bug
s to draw on. Five to ten touched a single cape, allowed me to check if they were anyone I recognized, then all but one would leave. One bug per cape, the rest scouting.

  Ligeia was the first I recognized. The conch shell mask, one of Accord’s people. Citrine would be close by…

  Or not. I swore under my breath, touched ground to reorient myself, then hurried around a corner.

  She was creating a massive portal, widening it with every passing moment. It made me wonder if there was a reason there were so few recordings of the Endbringer attacks, if the PRT hid this sort of thing. They’d hidden the particulars of the Echidna attack, and one of the reasons Alexandria had argued, a reason I had argued in favor of that, was because it wouldn’t go over well with the public to know just how much devastation a single parahuman could be capable of.

  Her portal was perhaps twenty feet across, circular, and cold water gushed out, as if forced by an incredible pressure.

  It was the sort of defensive measure that you employed when there weren’t any frontline combatants left. A desperate, violent one, like Sundancer’s sun. My bugs found her ear, and I communicated as clearly as I could, ”Run.”

  She didn’t hear. Doggedly, she stood her ground, drenching Behemoth, widening the portal’s radius. So hard to tell just how much, without losing bugs to the spray. Twenty five feet? Thirty?

  “Run,” I tried again. I muttered, “Run, Ligeia.”

  He erupted with lightning, and I could momentarily see his silhouette in the distance, the light cutting through the thick clouds of smoke and dust. I could see the tendrils of lightning as though through a strobe light, holding positions as they followed the flow of the water, then changing to other targets, finding solid conductors to latch onto. The entire geyser was lit up.

  She changed tacks, and the portal began sucking. The lightning disappeared, and Behemoth stumbled forwards towards the opening, the water now reversing direction.

  Eidolon appeared like a spear from the heavens, striking him between the shoulderblades. Behemoth nearly crashed through. His claw settled on the portal’s edge, as though it had a physical mass to it, slipped through. The lightning wasn’t traveling far, now, and the image of it was soon lost in the smoke.

  The portal closed, and Behemoth managed to claw his way back, simultaneously fending off Eidolon, the lighting growing stronger with every passing second.

  He lurched, and dropped several feet, the ground shaking. The light show marked the geyser spraying up around his leg, apparently having sunken into a portal.

  Close it, I thought. Sever it.

  But she didn’t. Not an option, it seemed.

  Move, Taylor. Deal with your own jobs first. How long did I have? Fifteen minutes? Thirteen? Twelve? So hard to keep track of time right now.

  My underlings. Wanton, he was nearby. Larger. He carried stretchers with the wounded, which moved around the very periphery of his range, where they rotated slower, and other objects closer to his core. An armband, a dismembered arm with scorch marks at the base.

  His or someone else’s?

  Once I caught up to him, I found the others a distance away. Tecton had fashioned something crude to attach to his armor, a shelf on his back that would hold injured capes. He rode his three-wheeled bike forward, stopped to slam his piledrivers into the ground to erect a wall of stone, punched through an obstruction, made more forward progress, and then created another wall. A staggered retreat. Grace, Cuff and Golem followed, each with wounded behind them on their vehicles.

  Annex? I couldn’t find him with my bugs. He was either swimming alongside them, helping to clear the way, or he was injured.

  I was on my way to catch up to them when Ligeia was struck down. A chance lightning bolt had struck her, just like that. Behemoth surged to his feet. Lightning traced the arc of the water that still geysered up, less impressive with every passing second.

  Even killing her hadn’t forced the portal closed. Damn.

  I came to a stop at Tecton’s side.

  “Sorry,” I panted. My voice sounded so rough-edged. So hard to breathe.

  “Tecton can’t talk,” Cuff said. Her voice was oddly level, in contrast to how she’d acted early in the fight.

  “What happened?”

  “Clipped by another cape,” she said. Still with no emotion, no affect.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Grace cut in. ”Where the fuck were you?”

  Tecton’s hand moved, settling on her shoulder. Grace backhanded it away.

  “I found what Behemoth wants,” I told her. ”Where’s Rime?”

  “Dead,” Golem said. He carried a small child, and was falling behind,

  “Who’s next in command?”

  “Prism, but she’s injured,” Grace said.

  “I need to communicate with someone in charge, and we don’t have time,” I said. ”Dragon? Defiant?”

  “Metal suits are all toast,” Grace said. ”No clue about Defiant.”

  “Revel? Your boss?” I asked. Then I corrected myself. ”Our boss?”

  “Saw her two minutes ago. No word on chain of command. She said we should run, take anyone we can help. Scion’s dropped off the radar, but last we heard, he was heading north. Not east, not west. He has to be trying to avoid this fight,” Grace almost snarled the words.

  “It’s not hopeless,” I said. ”We’ve got a shot, here. Behemoth’s target is a weapon. Kind of.”

  “A weapon?” Golem asked.

  “A bomb. Maybe big enough that it makes an atom bomb look like a hand grenade. Something that’s supposed to take down Endbringers.”

  “No shit?” Grace asked. I could see a trace of hope in her expression.

  “An energy weapon,” I clarified.

  I saw that hope become confusion. ”But that’s-”

  “It’s something that could go really right or really wrong,” I said. I saw the confusion become a momentary despair. ”Which is exactly why we need to get in touch with someone that matters. Where are the heroes? Where was Revel?”

  Golem pointed. ”That way.”

  “Citrine? Woman in yellow dress.”

  “Yellow bodysuit now,” Golem said. ”She stripped out of the dress when he pushed past the command center.”

  Fuck me. Now that he mentioned that, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d sensed her with my bugs and dismissed her as a stranger.

  “I think I know where she went,” I said. Same direction Revel went. I was already lifting off the ground. ”Go, drop off injured, then come back if you can.”

  “Revel told us to scram,” Grace said.

  “I’m telling you that we need to distract that motherfucker for five seconds,” I said. ”Where’s Annex?”

  “Here,” Annex said, from behind me.

  I turned to look as he stepped out of a building.

  “You’re with me,” I told him. He didn’t have any wounded with him.

  “I need to ride something,” he said, “Not fast enough.”

  “Define ‘something’,” I told him.

  “Something heavy enough to hold my entire body mass.”

  Could I hold an entire other person? No. I could hold a child, but that’d be a stretch.

  “Climb inside my costume,” I told him. ”The flight pack too.”

  He gave me a bewildered look. ”You realize I’d be right against-”

  “Move!” I barked. How long did I have? Not enough time. Modesty was not an issue.

  He flowed into my costume, and I could feel him against my skin, his body strangely cold and smooth. A lump of him stuck out over one shoulder. His head, not quite normal, not quite his specter form, had formed itself in my shoulderpad.

  And we were too heavy for the antigravity.

  I’d have to gamble, make compromises, take risks. I looked to the others, “Reach deep inside, find your second wind. Find your third wind, if you can. Rendezvous with me over there if you can make it in eight or ten minutes.”

  Then I deployed my wings,
activated the propulsion system alongside the antigrav. It was slow to lift off, but it was faster than running.

  If I got shocked, or if the electromagnetic radiation got any worse, this could cut out on me any second, but I needed to move. I needed assets, even if I didn’t know for sure what I’d do with them.

  The Chicago Wards peeled away behind me, abandoning the defensive walls and careful retreat in favor of speed.

  We found the defensive lines in a minute, if that.

  The Undersiders were there, fighting. Three stuffed goats and the dogs provided an added barricade for them to hide behind, while Foil was firing her needles. Regent held her quiver, handing her bolts to fire, while Imp lurked on the far side of the street, her back to the wall. Citrine was peering between two dogs, erecting a field of golden light near the Endbringer.

  Grue wasn’t with them.

  “Gah!” Regent cried out, as I landed, folding the wings back into place. ”Jesus fuck!”

  Right, I had two heads. ”Out, Annex.”

  Annex flowed out of my costume and straight into the ground. Within seconds, he was shoring up the wall, drawing in debris and using it to rebuild and reinforce.

  “Where’s Grue?” I asked.

  “Hospital. Burns,” Imp said.

  I nodded. ”Bad?”

  “More mentally than physically.”

  Ah.

  I could only hope he’d bounce back. To business. ”Revel. American cape with sort of an Asian-themed costume, lantern. Where is she?”

  “Zapped,” Regent said.

  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

  My disbelief was tempered by a measure of alarm. I was limited in time, and that was bad enough, but if Phir Sē decided our defending forces weren’t sufficient to put up a fight, he could strike sooner. If I couldn’t find someone capable of leading the defense, if we were little more than scattered remnants, why would Phir Sē wait?

  “Revel absorbs energy, kind of,” I said. ”She might be okay.”

  “She got hit by lightning,” Regent told me. ”Kind of lethal.”

  Rachel snorted.