Worm

by John McCrae

“Shit,” Tattletale said. No sooner was the word out of her mouth than Siberian came tearing out of the hole, truck held over her head. A section of the street was torn free and flipped through the air. Legend blasted it out of existence with an indigo flash of light.

  “Cash!” Legend bellowed the word. He began pelting Siberian with lasers. Beams capable of leveling buildings, and she ignored them.

  Cash? I saw the man in the black costume raising his hands. Dark lines began to surround Siberian and the truck, forming complex geometric angles.

  In the blink of an eye, as Siberian reached the peak of her leap, panes of glossy black material snapped into place between the dark lines. The resulting geometry contracted as if he meant to squish Siberian. It shattered instead.

  She hit the ground in a crouch, holding the truck in one hand, and the man in the black robe staggered, blood gushing from his nose. Legend caught him before he could collapse.

  Cache. Right. I was dimly aware of him, though I’d never seen his picture.

  Siberian charged the heroes, and they cleared out of the way in an instant. The one in power armor -Chariot- slid across the ground with the aid of his jetpack and built-in roller skates. Legend and the one in red, Glory Girl by process of elimination, took flight. Ursa whatever leaped to one side. They were the mobile group, the group that was able to get here fastest. They’d seen the sun appear, they’d seen it hit, and they’d come to step in.

  Siberian didn’t stop to engage the enemy. She continued on her course, charging through the ground floor of a building as she swung the truck in a lazy back and forth arc. I could see the roof buckling as vital supports disappeared.

  Legend handed Cache to Ursa and gave chase. I could see Chariot raising his hand to his right ear, pausing.

  He, Battery and Glory Girl turned and advanced towards Tattletale’s group.

  “Can we go?” Amy asked, from behind me. ”I didn’t- I didn’t think-”

  There was a pause. We could fight. My power would be largely foiled by those suits, but Grue had his power.

  “No,” Tattletale said. ”Come here, and bring Amy. They want to talk.”

  Amy pulled back, and I grabbed her wrist. Before she could hop off Sirius, Grue was directing the dog across the road.

  Chariot and Glory Girl pulled off their helmets as we arrived. Chariot was black, his narrow, triangular face largely covered in power armor. He had the scruff of a weak teenage beard on his chin.

  Glory Girl bore little resemblance to any of the last times I’d seen her. There were dark circles under her eyes. She stared at me. No- at Amy. The glare seethed with raw, seething hatred. It made every line of her face hard.

  “You’ve joined them, now?” She spoke, breaking the brief silence.

  “I just wanted to help against the Nine,” Amy said. Her voice was small, defeated. ”Can I-”

  “If you open your mouth and ask if you can use your power on me, I won’t be held responsible for what I do,” Glory Girl growled.

  “Don’t hate me, please. I don’t care what you think of me, but hate is too close to…” Amy trailed off.

  “Too close to what?” Glory Girl asked. She shrugged. Anger gave an edge to her words. ”Aren’t you going to say it? Can’t you admit what you did?”

  Amy hung her head, and her forehead rested between my shoulders, hair hanging down. She shook her head, but I doubted Glory Girl could see it.

  “Let’s put vendettas aside,” Chariot spoke. He smirked. ”We have bigger fish to fry.”

  “The Nine,” Trickster spoke.

  “The Nine,” Chariot said. ”But it’s not my place to talk tactics. I’m just the rookie. The messenger.”

  He extended one hand toward Tattletale. There was an earbud in his palm.

  “The Director of the PRT would like to have a word with you.”

  14.04

  “Me?” Tattletale quirked an eyebrow.

  “Sure,” Chariot said. Just behind and to one side of him, Glory Girl was glaring at Tattletale. She looked like she was ready to hit people. It was the kind of latent hostility I was used to seeing in Bitch.

  “Not terribly fair to my teammates, if it’s just a one-on-one conversation.”

  “Are you going to take this or not?” Chariot asked, his hand still extended in her direction.

  “No real point,” Tattletale shrugged. She tucked her hair behind her ear and turned her head. “Already have one.”

  Battery stepped forward, glancing over at our team, “This one is already set to the encrypted channel, it’s faster if-”

  Tattletale interrupted, ”Uplink three-three-five, encryption forty-two mod three-four-two-one-zero-zero-six-six-three-one-zero-”

  “You have access to our channel,” Battery growled, interrupting Tattletale’s spiel of numbers.

  Tattletale shrugged. ”Have for a while now.”

  Battery raised one hand to her ear.

  “Yeah, Battery,” Tattletale grinned, “Let’s do as the Director says and get down to business.”

  Battery drew a phone from her belt and tapped her fingers on the keypad for a moment. She gave Tattletale a dark look as she held the phone out.

  A woman’s voice said, “Not like you to tip your hand, Tattletale.”

  “Director. Are we really going to pretend you didn’t know I was listening in? You’ve been putting out misleading details to screw with my information gathering. Done quite a good job of it, if I may say so myself. Very subtle, all of it just right enough that even I was thrown off. Couldn’t trust much of it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And you did catch me off guard here. I didn’t expect you to contact me.”

  “You’ve been busy, your groups. Fighting Burnscar in the Docks, I gather that didn’t go so well,” the Director said, pausing.

  I didn’t even want to think about that. I hadn’t been back to check on my people or my territory since then. We had been busy.

  “Then you ambush the Nine, capturing two, one of whom you enslaved, but you lose one of your own in the process. You mount a rescue attempt. I take it that you were successful?”

  “Grue’s here,” Battery informed her. ”But he looks different.”

  “So they were successful. And now we find the Undersiders mounting a pincer attack, with this group targeting Siberian? I suspect you’re crossing the threshold of fearlessness and entering into foolishness.”

  That last comment nettled me. I spoke up, “The Nine don’t really leave you alone once you’ve scored a win. We had to seize our advantage.”

  “I see.”

  “And she has a weakness. Siberian, I mean,” Tattletale said.

  “Do tell?”

  “She’s a projection. Like Genesis is, as I’m sure you’re aware. Like Crusader’s duplicates. A quirk in reality that draws from her creator’s brain to create a body complete with all the physiological substructure. Which is largely for aesthetic effect, and I’d guess it gives her real self something the brain is familiar with controlling anyways.”

  “And the controller is vulnerable?” There was a note of interest in the Director’s voice.

  “Particularly vulnerable. She can’t extend her invincibility over her real body.”

  “I’m not sure I believe this. The Nine would have discovered this and I doubt the baser members could resist taking advantage of such a weakness.”

  “The power has range. I suspect the creator can stay miles away and still manage some control, but ventures closer for voyeuristic purposes or because it offers more control and faster response times.”

  “Much like Regent, hmm?”

  Tattletale paused. ”So you know that.”

  From the tone of the conversation, I would have expected a ‘No, you just told me.‘, but Tattletale wouldn’t have done that. More likely that her power confirmed her thoughts.

  Piggot nodded. “Shadow Stalker debriefed us. What do we know about this woman who controls-”

  “Man. The p
erson who projects Siberian is male. But he creates a female body. I think it’s tied into his trigger event. Someone he lost. If I had to guess, he sought revenge for her, but something happened. A side effect of the power, or just a seriously unhinged mental state… he lost it.”

  “I see. Thank you for the information. Unfortunately none of those possibilities are narrow enough that we can use them to track him down.”

  “Not in the short-term. In the long-term-”

  “I don’t intend for there to be a long-term, Tattletale. This ends today.”

  Tattletale paused. “What did you do?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You’re planning something. Something you’re wanting to keep a secret, and it’s big.”

  “Tattletale, you’ve been observing and gathering information on the PRT for some time now. Do you think I’m a stupid woman?”

  “Stupid? No. Genius? No.”

  There was the sound of a dry laugh from the other end of the phone. “No, I admit that’s true. But I’d like to think I’m resourceful. I’m fighting in a ring where my opponents are bigger, stronger, smarter, faster and better equipped than I am, and the cost of failure on my end is far greater than it is for any of you. You understand? I’m competent, and I wouldn’t waste my time trying to pull the wool over your eyes.”

  “So?”

  “No secrets. I’d planned to bait you here with the same subtle offers of information you praised me for earlier, but you’re here anyways, so I’ll tell you what I’m planning. In a matter of minutes, we firebomb the area where the main group of the Nine are situated.”

  “That’s insane,” I spoke.

  “Was that Skitter?”

  “Yeah,” Battery replied.

  “It’s necessary, Skitter,” the Director told me.

  “It’s breaking the rules between capes. The same rules that hold things together in an Endbringer event. We’re fighting a common enemy.”

  “True, but not the full story. We made no agreement of cooperation, and so there can be no betrayal here.”

  “My teammates are there, fighting the Nine, and they’re doing it for this city. You’d be punishing them for that.”

  “Legend did warn them that they shouldn’t. He was told to, I quote, ‘suck shit’.”

  That would be Bitch. Or maybe Imp. Probably Bitch.

  Tattletale quirked an eyebrow, “Did he specifically tell them they shouldn’t because you’re bombing the neighborhood?”

  “Would you believe me if I said he didn’t get the chance?”

  “I’d say fifty percent of it is that he didn’t get the chance, and fifty percent is that he didn’t try that hard.”

  The Director offered a noncommittal ‘mm hmm’ in reply.

  “And you’re telling us this because?”

  “Because we’ve studied you. We know what you prioritize, and I believe that you’ll enter the fray to save your teammates.”

  “Or we could phone them.”

  “Do you want to try?”

  Tattletale glanced at me and Grue. “No point, I guess. You’re blocking unofficial communications in the area.”

  “Yes. We have to hamper communication between the Nine if we want to catch them off guard. You understand.”

  “I do, and that’s totally the entire reason you’re doing that,” Tattletale said. She glanced over in the direction of the fighting. ”How long before the area is bombed?”

  “Can’t say. On the record, as with your teammates, we’re forbidding you from entering the area, but I expect you’re doing so anyways. Against my recommendation.”

  “Absolved of blame,” Grue spoke. His voice was tight, his body tense.

  The Director ignored him. ”The moment I heard you were in the picture, I told my subordinates to change the time. They’ll inform me about the new time of attack as soon as I’ve hung up. It’s not a perfect solution, but perhaps your actions from this point will reveal something about your power and its limitations. But please understand that we just can’t risk that you’ll inform the Slaughterhouse Nine about the scheduled attack.”

  “And there’s a chance we’ll be collateral damage, out of the picture and out of your hair after the Nine are gone.”

  “How sad, that you see monsters where none exist.”

  “Right.”

  “It was nice to finally talk with you, Tattletale. You should go help your teammates, if you’re going to.”

  “Fuck you, Piggot.”

  There was no response, and Battery deemed the conversation over, putting away the phone.

  In the brief period of silence that followed, while we got ourselves ready, a voice broke through, “Victoria-”

  “Don’t,” Glory Girl snapped. ”I didn’t tell anyone what you did, but that’s the last nice thing I’m going to do for you, understand? We’re not teammates. We’re not sisters. We’re not friends.”

  “I’m sorry, Amy,” Tattletale said, “But we’ve got to go.”

  We were moving a minute later, leaving the squad of heroes behind. Looking over my shoulder, I could see them getting in formation, clustering around Cache, who was regaining consciousness. Only Glory Girl stood apart, her arms folded.

  Wasn’t quite sure about the story there, but I was getting a sense of it.

  I could feel Amy tapping my arm.

  “What?” I had to raise my voice to be heard.

  “Drop me off,” she spoke into my ear.

  It took a few seconds to get the message to Grue and come to a complete stop. Tattletale stopped Bentley a hundred feet ahead. Trickster and Sundancer looked back with mild curiosity. Their costumes didn’t reveal much about their expressions.

  “Not thinking straight,” Amy said, “Not enough to go into a situation like this. Don’t want to get bombed. Um.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. ”Still willing to help?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m going to send you the bugs I can’t use. If you want to make more bugs that can relay my signal, that’d be great. If you can think of something else… I need firepower.”

  “And we’re going to be short on mobility if we need to make a run for it,” Grue said. ”Too many of us for two dogs that can carry people, unless we’re lucky and Genesis picked a form that works.”

  We’d sent Regent’s group out with Shatterbird, Imp and Ballistic, with the idea that Genesis would meet them there. They’d taken one of Coil’s trucks, since Bastard wasn’t old enough, big enough or trained enough to carry a rider.

  “What am I supposed to make?”

  “Figure it out, Amy. If you can’t think of anything, the relay bugs are excellent. Really.”

  “Okay.” She let me help her down.

  “Skitter,” Tattletale called out, “We should be close enough. Want to pass them a message?”

  I nodded. I had six of the relay bugs, and it took only a minute to set them up so they formed a chain, extending my reach for an additional six city blocks in one direction. Eight and a half in total.

  I swept them outward, and the one at the furthest point lagged behind. Still, it gave me the opportunity to cover a wide area. Bugs mobilized throughout, and I began funneling the less offensive ones back toward Amy. No-see-ums, earthworms, caterpillars and roughly half of the houseflies in the area began filtering back. I maintained some of the dragonflies and other mobile bugs for the sake of getting a feel for the area.

  I could sense Regent’s group, running to cover. Ballistic was bombarding Crawler, relying on the impacts to drive the brute back. Crawler was fast -and he was agile, with preternatural reflexes- but Ballistic was unloading on him with projectiles that moved faster than sound. Crawler dodged only two in three, and Ballistic followed up on any successful hits with a series of shots to pound Crawler into the nearest available surface and pin him there. Genesis had formed a body that was winged. It resembled a pterodactyl with arms, a griffon or something in that vein. She was making an effort to drop large chunks of rubble
onto Crawler. He was strong enough that it barely slowed him down, but time he spent hauling a section of wall off of himself was time for Ballistic to get his hands on material for another shot. Shatterbird offered support with a constant hail of glass to harry Crawler and keep him from finding traction on the pavement.

  Jack, Bonesaw, Mannequin… I found the former two in a parking lot. My bugs sensed what I judged were Bonesaw’s mechanical spiders, tearing cars apart and converting the components into more spiders. There was a group of people with her, shuffling behind them.

  Mannequin was MIA. That was bothersome. He was able to detect and avoid my bugs, which meant he was a factor I had to keep in the back of my mind.

  “Found them, except for Mannequin. Amy? Be careful. I don’t know if Jack’s team is going to break the rules they set, but Mannequin could come after you.”

  I was so used to dealing with my teammates, people who were experienced in this sort of thing, that I hadn’t expected much more than confirmation. She looked legitimately scared at the prospect.

  “Here,” I directed a ladybug into my palm and extended it towards her. ”Crush it, and I’ll come. Or transmit some signal with my power. You have my backup, understand?”

  “Okay.” She took it, but she didn’t look reassured. The first bugs were flowing into her cupped hands. I could feel nervous systems intermingling, two bugs becoming one, and that strange hollowness that told me I didn’t have a complete grasp on how they functioned, that there was a part of them that was beyond the reach of my power.

  I drew out words with my bugs, on a surface of wall where Regent would be able to see. ’Evacuate.’

  He ran his fingers through the bugs. After a moment’s thought, I gathered them into a square, organized by rank and file. It took me two tries, but I managed to make them move to form letters, then regroup.

  He dragged his fingertip through the bugs to spell out a reply. ’Can’t. We run we can’t keep crawler down’.

  ‘We’re coming,’ I wrote to him.

  “Let’s go!” I called out. Tattletale turned in her seat and kicked Bentley to get him going. Grue did the same for Sirius.

  Having gathered as many bugs as I could, I drew my relay bugs back and spaced them around the perimeter of my own range, effectively extending it by a block in every direction.