Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  I’d done it without thinking, bringing them with me. They stood on ledges and jutting rocks all over the peak, surrounding me. More than anything else, I could feel their fear. With so many of them, it was indistinct.

  I forced my own head to move, felt the crick in my neck, where I hadn’t really moved my head in a long time.

  The ones who were still in the Birdcage were the ones the cell block leaders had felt apprehensive about. Not necessarily stronger, but less predictable, less reliable. More of a danger than a help, if given free reign.

  As far as I could tell, it was the last large group of experienced capes I could collect.

  I opened a portal within the Birdcage, to capture my first prisoner.

  Containment foam rained down from the ceiling, sealing him in place.

  Dragon, I thought.

  I didn’t make another move. I waited. I’d expected this. It was why I’d come here in person. I could use the clairvoyant’s power and see a hangar in one mountain valley opening up.

  It took only a minute. A small armored suit arrived, a fast-moving model rather than a heavy combat model, much like the one she’d used to counteract our first attack on the Brockton Bay PRT headquarters.

  It perched on a rock in front of me.

  Dragon’s weapons were primed and ready to fire, the threat implict. When she spoke, her voice as clear as a bell in the clear mountain air.

  It was the same language Shén Yù had spoken to me. The same incomprehensible language Teacher had lapsed into.

  English.

  When I met Dragon’s eyes with my own, my head shook with the shock I felt. I might have collapsed, numb, if I hadn’t been holding on to the clairvoyant, with Doormaker gripping my belt.

  It was the anger that kept me going. I’d felt a glimmer of it when attacking the palace. I’d felt it when dealing with capes and civilians every damn step of the way. The only thing I wanted was for everyone to do what they were supposed to do. To be good and to be fair, feed the hungry, give shelter, to fix the things that were broken and to fucking band together against the real monsters. Save the world. For the world to make some damn sense.

  I found myself chuckling a little, and it was just as displaced and not-quite right as any of my individual movements. Off kilter, more like I was doing a bad job of acting than real laughter.

  I couldn’t stop it, even as I tried to pull myself together. I turned my face towards the sky, my eyes streaming. Her voice continued, insistent, the gentleness giving way to concern.

  Hardly the last injustice I’d have to face down in the coming hours, but it was a front runner for the biggest. The most decent damn person I’d ever met, and she wasn’t even human. She was the only person who was definitely still alive who’d helped me without an iota of selfishness.

  I couldn’t negotiate my way out of this. Even with the rapport we’d established, I couldn’t trust her to give me the benefit of a doubt.

  As much as I didn’t want to, I knew that the only way forward would be to destroy her.

  30.04

  I didn’t break eye contact with Dragon. My eyes were damp, and it was impossible to find a balance in terms of keeping still. I either slumped over or I held myself so rigid that I trembled, an ache creeping over my body, my muscles too taut.

  Back when Emma and I had been friends, way back in middle school, we’d done one of the sleepover dares. Going into a dimly lit room and staring out our reflections. Repeat the name of the monstrous woman, a name that escaped me now, over and over, without breaking eye contact.

  The freaky thing had been that it had worked. My expression had torn, twisted and distorted, dark patches creeping over my cheeks and forehead, my mouth disappearing with only a blank stretch of skin in its place. I’d fled the room.

  I’d later read up on it, because understanding something meant being able to handle it, and my problems back then had been ones I could understand. The effect was a result of the mind’s idleness. We only really saw a little bit of what we looked at, and our brain worked constantly to fill in the gaps and unimportant spaces with its best guesses. In a dimly lit room, with the mind focused on the steady, hypnotic repetition, the brain would fill in spaces with the only reference points available to it, taking from features in its field of view to patch together the face. Fear, imagination and the recently-told scary story of having one’s entrails ripped out through their mouth did the rest.

  The mind was an amazing thing, but it had limits and weaknesses. I’d been taking in too much even before I added the clairvoyant.

  Dragon spoke, her voice insistent, concerned, and pitched as a question at the end.

  I raised my arm and the stump of a limb to the sides, bringing the clairvoyant’s hand with me. An exaggerated shrug. I then let them flop down to my sides.

  Dragon said something else in response, a statement, quiet.

  Using the clairvoyant was an art, it seemed, and I hadn’t received any advice on how to handle it. I was figuring it out, though. My focus on Dragon was like staring into the mirror. There were too many details to clarify to keep my attention in one place for so long. Things were starting to bleed around the edges in areas I wasn’t focusing on, like a watercolor painting that was bleeding out beyond the lines.

  Subtle, but it was there. Was it the entity, trying to tap into my memories to hash things out where my perceptions were failing? It wasn’t anything substantial, not yet. I was focused on Dragon, above all else. The various people, the capes, the fighting, all were clear in my awareness. It was the hills, the mountains, the vast spaces of water or field without anyone nearby that were shifting subtly. Cities in particular seemed to be a jumble. Or was it just easier to see the differences and errors when a city was rearranged in a way that didn’t make sense?

  More to the point, was I simply losing my mind entirely?

  I’m running out of time.

  I raised my hand again, reaching out towards the Birdcage, below us, towards the comparative miles of space and containment foam, the forcefields and countless other effects that had been worked together to form the most secure facility they could manage. The empty space between the hanging structure itself and the walls that had been thickened by the engine was vast in a way that staggered me, just a little. Shit like that didn’t help with the fucked-up perception thing.

  My hand was shaking, the muscles in my forearm too tense, the hand too loose.

  Without breaking that eye contact, I gestured, turning my hand over, curling the fingers. I opened a portal at the same time, inside the Birdcage.

  Dragon shifted her stance, and that same room flooded with containment foam.

  She said something in that same, quiet voice.

  As communication went, it would have to do. Not the words I couldn’t understand, but the gestures. I’d declared what I wanted, she’d drawn the line.

  I wanted so badly to hug her, to cross the distance between us and throw my arm around her muzzle, or around one of her legs. To have something physical to hold on to that I wasn’t actively controlling. I couldn’t give her an opening to take me out of action.

  I began opening a portal beneath a flow of lava, a trickle on Earth Bet, at the mouth of a cave system. The lava met the edge of the portal, and it winked out of existence. A splash of it passed through the portal, touching Dragon where her ‘neck’ met her body.

  She moved, jet-engine ‘wings’ reorienting, pulsing with thrusters going on full to move her fifty feet to the right. Her claws met a cliff face, digging into stone, and the thrusters kept going, pushing her against the rock and holding her on the surface.

  Right. Okay. A different tack then.

  She was retaliating, too. Her guns trained on me, barrels glowing.

  I opened defensive portals before I even saw what she was firing at me. Lightning, crackling in visible arcs around what looked like sphere-shaped empty spaces. Controlled pockets of ionized atmosphere, probably, to give the lightning a path to travel.<
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  The lightning traveled through the portal and struck Scion from behind. I closed the portal before he could react.

  The guns changed, the barrels contracting, the mounts behind the barrels reconfiguring. A portal simultaneously opened behind me.

  She sprayed containment foam. Not a stream, but an honest spray, as if she was trying to paint the entire mountain peak.

  I stepped through a portal, putting myself halfway on the other side of the world. I stood on the roof of the Byzantine Tower in Istanbul. Third tallest building in the world, surrounded by a shattered city and waterways that were now polluted with detritus and rubble.

  Then I opened fire. Every parahuman I controlled with a ranged attack or gun fired into the portals I was opening beside them. The exit-points were beside Dragon, and a cascade of bullets, lasers, energy shots, ice, lightning, metal and other effects obliterated her ship, tearing through the cliff face.

  I moved my collection of people out of the way before the resulting rockslide could kill anyone. The thinkers and tinkers joined me, the rest relocated to other points on the mountain.

  The ship she’d sent my way was slag. Barely worth calling scrap metal. I checked it over twice.

  Dragon deployed her drones. Not ships, but tens of thousands of airborne craft, most no larger than a basketball, kept aloft by antigrav panels like the ones on my flight pack. I already knew that each was loaded with a specific payload. Containment foam, EMP pulses, explosives, tear gas and more.

  This wasn’t a typical fight. It was more like a war, two parties with vast resources at their disposal, with armies and incredible potential in terms of the tools we could bring to bear. In a typical fight, things would end when one person knocked the other out, but a war rarely ended that way. The fighting would continue until we’d done enough damage to the other that they had to give up. Dragon was decentralized, with no single point that could be attacked to remove her from the fight. Truth was, I’d probably have to destroy everything to destroy her. If she didn’t give up.

  If she could give up.

  As for me, I was inaccessible, out of reach.

  I was quietly confident I could win this, one way or another. She’d have to defeat every cape in my little army, every cape I potentially acquired in the meantime, and I doubted her willingness to do that.

  Don’t destroy my army. Please don’t be willing, don’t be capable. If that happens, then I’ve failed completely and totally, I’ve done this to myself and will go out as a villain, all for nothing.

  The fight against Scion was ongoing. I needed to be able to focus, especially with the way things seemed to be breaking down in the least important areas. I couldn’t split my attention between him and Dragon, or something that was nigh-impossible would become harder.

  The drones closed the distance, and my army began gunning them down. They were evasive, and I could take in the whole picture to see how Dragon was managing them. Not simultaneously, but close enough it barely mattered.

  I tapped into precogs and clairvoyants, along with other thinkers, gauging the best approach.

  Shén Yù informed me of the general thrust of Dragon’s attack. I could see it through his perceptions, mottled, indistinct lines in the battlefield. X drones moving to one of my groups, Y drones to another. The path they intended to travel… I could tell that as well. An initial wave of attacks to debilitate, and then the second wave, drones for a follow-up strike. The lines had a feeling to them. I could almost assign labels. Infantry, cavalry.

  I looked around me. If I drew parallels, tried to correlate what I was seeing with what Shén Yù was seeing…

  She was aiming to strike me. How?

  Seventeen Dragon-craft deployed from the hangar. Again, not combat models, but utility models, fast response and rescue. Craft she’d been holding in reserve, no doubt because the cost of deploying them outweighed their potential benefit against Scion.

  The clearer Dragon’s direction of attack became, the more Shén Yù’s awareness clarified on her weak points. Distant locations and objectives. Some were objectives I couldn’t identify, even with the clairvoyant. He only saw within the boundaries of Earth’s atmosphere.

  Others… valid targets. I sent one squad to an army base. Pulses of gravity and intense heat let me detonate the contents of a munitions depot and direct the force of the explosion in one direction. The end result annihilated a data center Dragon had set up nearby.

  I’m sorry.

  I could see her reaction, in the broadest sense. Where her drones had been micromanaged before, they weren’t being controlled now. She was focusing elsewhere, controlling the larger craft and assigning them to the protection of the various data centers.

  There was a skeleton crew of people at one facility. A data management firm that Dragon had bought out, I suspected, because the entire databank was reading as hers. Row upon row of servers, standing like tombstones in refrigerated rooms. Freezing air poured through the floor, pushing up against the warmer air. The facility seemed more like an alien landscape of steel and cold than anything of human design, complete with a constant, persistent weather pattern – a constant, gale-force wind generated by the movements of hot and cold air in what had to have been a careful design.

  That the crew had stayed suggested something about their personalities. Discreet, paranoid people, who’d built a shelter inside the facility as a hiding place, in case things went to hell.

  Which was pretty damn reasonable, considering the sheer amount of nightmarish crap there was in the world.

  I used portals to take control of them. I couldn’t read what was on the screens, so I had them take a more direct route. They made their way through the building, throwing switches, pulling plugs and opening sealed doors.

  Three of my Yàngbǎn capes entered the facility through portals and began generating heat as they’d done outside the C.U.I.’s Imperial Palace. I could find the freezer… and another cape could step through to damage it. Dragon’s utility craft arrived on site, but the damage had been done.

  I’m sorry, I thought, again. My attention shifted to the monitors and gauges in her various databanks. I could see dials shift closer to red, numbers rising, gauges nearly filled.

  Dragon could manage her things, I told myself. She had safeguards, ways of keeping her data safe. There was no doubt in my mind on that score. Each time I disabled a facility, I forced her to consolidate, to put the resources that remained under further stress.

  My ranged capes aimed for portals once again. This time, I put the exit portals against Earth’s atmosphere, aiming for the general direction of a satellite.

  It took thirty seconds of sustained fire before Shén Yù’s power stopped telling me it was a weak point. Other thinker powers in my range were giving me similar feedback. A cape with perfect eyesight was telling me it could even see the explosion.

  The displays across Dragon’s private realm shifted further.

  She was saying something to Defiant, words I couldn’t make out. I could see him tensing, moving like he was going to go somewhere. Then Dragon spoke again, and he went still. His head turned in Scion’s general direction.

  Please stop, I thought. Don’t make me go further.

  She went further. She intensified and organized the attack, and her drones reached my front line, disabling them with nonviolent means. Tranquilizers, electric pulses, containment foam and tear gas.

  I let it happen, because I needed to see what her second wave attack was, before she organized a more efficient frontline attack.

  The second wave approached, and they made a beeline for the portals that were controlling my minions. The portals that would exit right next to me. But the drones were too large…

  Until they jettisoned outer shells and accelerated. Half the payload, but they had the same kind of propulsion jets I had in my flight pack. I moved the portals a fraction of a second before they speared through, and they continued onward through open air.

  Shén Y�
� informed me about the third wave’s imminent attack. Not a feeling of attack, but… the initial wave had read to his senses as something like infantry or spearmen. The second wave had read as cavalry.

  This? A siege weapon? The lines that Shén Yù’s power painted on the world indicated something deliberate, devastating, but diffuse, somehow indirect.

  I directed fire at the drones, and forcefields served to protect most. The non-Yàngbǎn capes I had that could penetrate the forcefields were few and far between, the drones too numerous.

  They set up, planting their mechanical limbs firmly on the ground, and then they deployed, pyramid-shaped structures, glowing blue at the peak.

  My portals began opening, ones I’d closed not long ago. Portals I’d opened to control my capes, and the larger portal I’d opened to escape to this location on the Byzantine Tower. I couldn’t shut them.

  Drones started to make their way through.

  I, in turn, opened another portal, handing one tinker device to Shén Yù before hurrying on, leading the rest through. Portals blocked the drone’s ranged fire.

  The Yàngbǎn’s strategist used Teacher’s device, and all the doors in his vicinity slammed shut.

  Dragon’s path to me was shut.

  I watched the meters and gauges. Each attack had pushed Dragon’s remaining resources closer to capacity. That was on top of the extra strain she was under with Scion having done so much damage to the Eastern seaboard. He would have eliminated other databanks when he’d attacked. Just like me, she’d been wounded and disabled before entering into our private war. Just like me, she desperately wanted to focus on Scion, but she couldn’t afford to.

  If each attack pushed the remaining databanks four percent closer to capacity, at a guess… no. I was having trouble putting the numbers together. Had to eyeball all of it.