Worm

by John McCrae

  “The ships have all arrived,” Chevalier said, “I’ve received the data on the other participating teams, those not already fighting will reinforce as they’re able. We should expect record numbers, we shouldn’t expect it’ll help. Any news on the locals?”

  “Gathering and setting up defenses at India Gate,” Rime said. “It seems to be his destination.”

  “The gate? There’s nothing there,” Chevalier said. “Only population.”

  “If it’s not a soft target,” Revel said, “then we can play the long game, buy time for Scion to arrive.”

  “Let’s assume it’s soft. We made that mistake once, never again,” Chevalier said. “Okay. Listen up!”

  He raised his voice, commanding the attention of everyone present.

  “We’ve already notified you if we believe you have the capacity to engage Behemoth. Anyone else is operating as search, rescue, and support. Maintain a distance of at least a hundred feet from Behemoth at the very minimum. Get any closer, you probably won’t have a chance of escaping if he decides to close the gap. Be mindful of line of sight, because he can and will tag you with a lightning bolt, and it’s not something you can dodge. Assume every structure will fall down in a heartbeat, and know that there’s no good place to hide and wait for this to be over. Keep moving and move smart.”

  The crowd of heroes was utterly silent. I could see the Undersiders on the opposite end of the enclosure. The spotlights behind them rendered them little more than silhouettes with glowing edges.

  “There’s no sugarcoating it,” Chevalier said. “The fact that you’re here, today, knowing the state things are in, you’re the biggest damn heroes I’ve worked with. I’m not going to make any big speeches. Better we get out there and save lives. Hit him hard if you see the chance, keep an eye out for whatever his goal might be, communicate with other groups as best as you’re able. Stay spread out so he can’t wipe too many of us out at once. You work best with the people you know, so form your own teams, stick with the people you’ve operated with before. Go.”

  Heroes, already gathered in their groups, mobilized.

  I started to approach the Undersiders. Defiant’s hand on my shoulder stopped me.

  I could see Tattletale and Accord stepping off to one side, talking. She gave me one glance, offered me an apologetic half-frown, and then continued walking.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “The Chicago Wards,” he said.

  “What about them? I can function better alongside the Undersiders.”

  “Dragon thinks you can contribute just as much or more with the Wards group, and they’re the team that wants you.”

  I glanced at the groups that hadn’t departed yet. Some were getting geared up, another group had a cape touching each member in turn, turning their skin to what looked like stone. On the far end, past those other groups, I could see Tecton, Grace, and Wanton with three others I didn’t recognize. They were looking at me.

  “It’s the smart choice,” he said, “But it’s your choice.”

  And, giving evidence to the statement, he departed, entering the Pendragon and freeing me to decide without his influence.

  I sighed, then activated the antigrav panels to give myself some forward thrust, speeding me up as I moved to join Tecton’s group.

  “Yep,” he said, to one of the newbies.

  “You’re leader, I’m recon?” I asked. “Like it was in New York?”

  “No, you’re leader as long as this fight lasts,” Tecton said.

  I must have looked surprised, because he said, “You’ve been in two of these fights, right? If we count Echidna?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve only been in the one, and I was never the shot-caller. That was a partnership between Raymancer and me, and he’s gone.”

  “My condolences,” I said.

  He nodded, but my focus was on the other members of the team, trying to account for the resources I had available. Grace had changed her martial arts outfit for something with more coverage, a chainmail mesh like the PRT uniforms wore. Wanton still wore free-flowing clothes, but he wouldn’t stay in that form.

  The other three… A girl with bands of metal running down each of her arms and legs, with heavy gauntlets, boots and a breastplate, a mask etched to look like a feminine face, with white lenses over the eyes. Her platinum blond hair had three individual braids, two draped over her shoulders, with the ends bound in more bands of the blue-black metal.

  There was a guy in a cowl, with another metal mask, who reminded me a bit of Shadow Stalker, but he wore white, and carried no weapon I could see.

  And the last one… heavyset, with armor that seemed too generic.

  “You’re a rookie?”

  “All three of those guys are rookies,” Tecton said. “They cannibalized our non-core team members to supplement other groups, and-”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I guess you three are getting thrown in the deep end. Names?”

  “Cuff,” said the girl in blue-black armor.

  “Annex,” the cowled one told me.

  “Golem,” the last one said, his voice muffled by his helmet.

  I frowned behind my mask, perplexed. “You named yourself after the little bastard from The Lord-”

  “No,” he said. I could hear him sigh from behind his helmet. “I’m thinking of changing it.”

  If not from the trilogy, then… I fixed the pronunciation, compensating for how his muffled voice had modified it. Right. Golem, from the myth.

  “I get it, nevermind. Listen, we’re going to move out, and you’re going to explain your powers en route. You know who I am?”

  There were nods all around.

  “You’re still okay with following my orders?”

  Again, nods.

  I saw the Undersiders moving out, along with the Ambassadors.

  “We’re supplementing and supporting the Undersiders for the time being. You okay with that?”

  A touch more hesitant, they nodded.

  “Then let’s go,” I said.

  23.x (Interlude; Number Thirty-Six)

  Lightning ripped across the landscape, following its own path, independent, breaking every rule that electricity was supposed to follow. It danced over the outside surfaces of houses, running across concrete and leaving glassy scorch marks in its wake. It touched objects that should have grounded it, channeling it into the earth, but leaped for another target instead.

  The Yàngbǎn raised their hands, already reacting.

  Twenty-third path, fifth benefit. Reflexes.

  Thirteenth path, third form. Forcefield constructions, barrier.

  The forcefields absorbed the worst of the energy.

  Cody was already moving to use the thirty-sixth path to rescue anyone who’d absorbed the remnants of the shock. None. It hadn’t touched them. He was among the last of them to dismiss his forcefield. The forcefields drained their reserves of energy, and weren’t to stay up for too long. They’d been drilled on this.

  “Qiān chū.” Three ordered.

  They mobilized.

  Fourth path. Shallow flight.

  Ninth path. Short range electromagnetism. They skated off of the little exposed metal that was available around them, car hoods and pipes, gaining speed to augment their flight.

  There were forty-two paths in all. Forty-two powers. No, he corrected himself, there were forty-one now that Seventeen was dead. More would die by the day’s end.

  The hope, the plan, was to demonstrate the Yàngbǎn’s strength, to show that they had the answer, a way to defeat the Endbringers. It wouldn’t happen today, but a solid demonstration would serve to bring others on board.

  They hadn’t been asked. The expectation was that they would give their lives for this. He would have refused. He’d dealt with an Endbringer before, and he still hadn’t recovered from that chance meeting. He’d lost everything, been stripped of friends and family both.

  “Yàngbǎn qiáng!” Five call
ed out.

  “Yàngbǎn qiáng!” The group responded in chorus. Cody’s voice joined theirs, quieter. His pronunciation wasn’t good. In all this time with the group, he hadn’t even managed to grasp the fundamentals of the language. Mispronunciation was punished, not by any reprimand, but in a subtle way. They would speak to him even less than they were now, he would get less food. Maybe for a few hours, maybe for a few days. The thought bothered him, and the degree to which it unsettled him was more disturbing still.

  Something so minor as that shouldn’t have mattered so much to him, but it was all he had, now.

  There was a crash of lightning, and a building collapsed, directly in their path. Flames and smoke barred their path.

  “Shèntòu!” Three ordered, his voice nearly drowned out in the noise of the building settling. They were still moving forward, not even slowing.

  The forward group hit the barrier with localized vacuums. Individually, they were weak, but with twelve all together, flames were quenched, smaller objects levitated into the air.

  Cody joined the middle group in shearing through the remaining wreckage. Thirty-first path. The cutting lasers. The first group was slowing a fraction, and Cody slowed his flight to hold formation.

  The twelve members of the Yàngbǎn only accelerated, flying around the group members they had been following. They turned solid, space distorting around them as they rendered themselves invincible and incapable of any action but their pre-existing momentum, effectively human bullets. They tore through the wreckage, clearing a path for the rest.

  He felt a rush, just being part of the unit. Being a part of a maneuver that let them cut through a burning ruin of a building with the ease they had.

  Some of that rush, he knew, was the second path. Magnification of powers. Two wasn’t present, she was too valuable to risk losing, but they still shared her power between them. Each of them had a sliver of her ability to enhance the powers of those nearby. It was the reason their powers worked to the degree that they did, a feedback loop in power augmentation across their whole unit.

  There were more things feeding into his consciousness, other senses he wasn’t actively tapping into. The twenty-third path, it enhanced his perception, particularly his awareness of others, the threat an individual person posed, and enhanced his reflexes, particularly when dealing with people who wanted to hurt him. It was of minimal use against Behemoth, but it made him cognizant of the other members of the Yàngbǎn, aware of their breathing, the noises they made as they ran.

  In this way, the group subsumed him, rendered him a part of something overwhelming. For now, in the midst of this, the deep loneliness and isolation was gone. Language was almost unnecessary, beyond the one- or two-word commands he needed to know for particular maneuvers and directives.

  Zig-zagging down the streets, they naturally settled back into their established rank and file. With every member of the group having access to the same pool of powers, placement in the formation was a question of experience and how expendable they were. Cody was an essential defensive asset, no use if he was taken out of action, so he rested in the middle of the group, surrounded by people who could protect him in a pinch.

  Rumbles marked the collapses of taller buildings as Behemoth advanced, somewhere a quarter-mile behind them.

  The heat was oppressive. Even as they got further away from the monster, the fire only seemed to get worse. The smoke was the worst part of it, preventing them from seeing or tracking their enemy. It meant they couldn’t see more than a hundred or so feet around them, and they didn’t have any idea whether they were going to walk straight into the monster’s path or wind up encircled by burning buildings. Their flight depended on proximity to a solid surface. It involved hovering five to ten feet off the ground while moving at fifty or sixty miles an hour. They had another means of flight, but less controlled, one that risked putting them above the skyline, obvious targets for a lightning strike.

  Was the Behemoth smarter than he looked? Was the destruction seeded in a way that would spread? Fires started where buildings were closely packed?

  Cody could feel his skin prickling. His mask was filtering out the smoke, but the heat, it was getting unbearable.

  “Zhàn wěn,” Ten said.

  “Zhàn wěn,” the group echoed her, their voices strong. It was an encouragement, an affirmation. Cody didn’t know what it meant. He’d been with them for an indeterminate length of time, what felt like years, but he didn’t feel any closer to grasping the language than he had been on the first day. He’d had help, briefly, but that had been stopped.

  Every member of the group was permitted to speak freely, but virtually every utterance was vetted by the group as a whole. If, like Ten, someone were to speak, and others were in agreement, deeming the phrase acceptable, then the response was clear. If the statement was poorly timed, or out of tune with the group’s line of thinking, then it was ignored, followed only by a crushing silence.

  Cody had never experienced the adrenaline rush that Ten was no doubt experiencing over the simple act of getting a response from the squadron. The group had never deemed his statements acceptable, because his pronunciation was poor. He was a member of a tight-knit crowd, yet utterly, completely alone.

  “Tíng!” one of the members in the rear called out.

  They dropped to the ground, their landings practiced, wheeling around a hundred and eighty degrees by planting one foot on the ground and sweeping the other out.

  His forcefield was up before he even knew what the threat was. Individually weak, strong in formation: a makeshift bubble of overlapping forcefields twenty feet over their heads.

  The glowing projectile swiftly grew in his perspective, giving him only a second to brace himself before it crashed down on the wall of forcefields.

  The wave of heat was intense, even on the other side of the barrier. It seemed almost liquid as it spilled out over the edges. In seconds, they were surrounded in flame. The forcefields sealed it off, prevented superheated air from burning them alive, but the viscosity meant it was resting against the forcefield.

  Magma?

  They’d drilled on abstracts, on possible situations. Attacks from any direction. Attacks in various forms. He’d never really considered the ideas behind dealing with magma, but he had the tools. Being a member of the Yàngbǎn meant being constantly drilled. They took your power, all but a fraction of it, but every member of the group had that same fraction. Every member was expected to know how to use every power, to know when and to do it in unison with the rest of the squad.

  A small handful of individuals in the C.U.I. hadn’t been brought onto the group. Null, the cape who made the Yàngbǎn possible, was independent. He couldn’t be a part of the whole. Others included Tōng Líng Tǎ, who had a power that was too slow to use, not worth the fractional decrease in power that came with including her in the network, Shén yù, the strategist, and Jiǎ, the tinker that supplied the C.U.I. with its devices, including the simulations for the drills.

  It was those drills and simulations that allowed him to react a precious fraction of a second faster as he responded. It kept him in sync with the others in the group as he joined half of them in letting his forcefield dissipate, simultaneously reaching out to apply another power.

  Thirty-second path. Nullification waves.

  The effect was short ranged, and he could see the shifting in the air as it extended, passed through the gaps in the forcefield where the magma and heated air were only just beginning to leak through miniscule gaps.

  The waves generated by thirty-two served to stabilize. It stalled things in motion, warmed up cold things, cooled warm things. It silenced, stilled.

  The magma cooled with surprising rapidity, but then, the power was affecting the inside at the same time it affected the outside, rather than trying to cool the outside to a degree that would extend inward.

  Path thirty-two. It made him think of Thirty-two, the member. The source of that particular pow
er. He snuck a glance at her.

  She was one of four outsiders, four people not native to China. She’d been his closest ally. Something more.

  “Dǎpò,” Seven ordered.

  Like the others, the maneuver was a practiced one. The last forcefields dropped, and the group mobilized. Odd-numbered members of the squad crouched, legs flexing, while even-numbered members, Cody included, reached out.

  Path fourteen. Vacuum spheres.

  The odd-numbered members of the group pierced the barrier of cooled magma, and the vacuum spheres scattered the shards.

  Another sphere was already in the air, aimed close to them, if not at the exact same spot.

  Without even thinking about it, he trained a laser on it. Others were doing the same, or following suit. The glob of magma, still mid-air, was separated into loose pieces, no longer as aerodynamic as it had been. It expanded, fell short, disappeared into the cityscape between them and Behemoth.

  Each action Cody performed as a part of the unit was validating, affirming. It was a series of small payoffs for the drills he’d gone through for over a year, with smaller groups and the Yàngbǎn as a whole. The drills had been intense, with one new situation every one or two minutes, like flash cards, only they were holograms, color coded polygons and shapes with just enough mass that they could be felt. If they failed the scenario, the offending members of the squad would be named out loud, the scenario shuffled back into the list of possibilities, so it might repeat in five minutes, or two hours.

  Cody was well aware of what they were really doing, between the six hours of drills and the twelve hours of schooling that combined lectures on the C.U.I. with traditional education. He knew why they only got forty-five minutes in total to eat for their two daily meals, only five hours of rest a night, why every minute of the day was scheduled.

  He’d always told himself that he wouldn’t be a victim, that when the time came and he was indoctrinated into a cult, he’d recognize the targeted isolation, the practice of tiring him out so he’d be more amenable to suggestion, more likely to conform. He’d told himself that he would rebel and maintain his individuality.