Worm

by John McCrae

  The map highlighted the areas with the highest percentage chances in blue. Violet marked the next stage down, red for the next, and so on, all around the color spectrum. The Nine had a day’s head start. There were a number of places they could go with a day’s travel.

  But the key areas were small towns. Of the data on the screen, the small towns were marked with the highest risk.

  “Dragon,” Chevalier’s face appeared on a feed. One of the cameras on the PRT-issue phones, judging by the angle and resolution. “You’ve got the go-ahead from the commander-in-chief.”

  More text popped up, indicating that programs were being searched for. Resource use was already being reallocated, in preparation for a major endeavor. It took a moment before the loading began.

  Voice modelling program loading… Complete.

  Text flowed out, detailing the individual subroutines and supporting processes. There was the composite that formed her accent, the filtering program, no less than three programs that double-checked her voice before she spoke, to catch any of the corruption that might slip through.

  “Thank you, Chevalier,” Dragon’s voice was clear. She hung up without another word.

  Azazels deployed at the most likely sites, at the perimeters of the high-risk cities as more feeds lit up, taking in footage from every available source. Dozens, at first, then hundreds, a thousand, ten thousand individual feeds. Permissions had been granted from the President, and Dragon had open access to everything capable of taking pictures or recording video.

  The number of feeds began to swell as Dragon systematically decrypted and accessed more feeds. Around each one of those feeds, anywhere from two to two hundred facial recognition programs began to pore through the data, interlinking and networking with one another.

  Her innate programming forbade using viruses to infect the computers of Americans that didn’t have a warrant out for their arrests, but she’d found a workaround. An Indonesian cartel had set up an extensive botnet, with soccer moms, the elderly, children and the uneducated unwittingly installing viruses onto their systems. These viruses, in turn, gave the cartel the ability to use the infected computers for other purposes. Sending out spam emails about pharmaceuticals or penis enlargement or drugs that gave superpowers wasn’t worth much, but when they could send out millions or tens of millions of emails a day, it proved profitable.

  Dragon had let the cartel extend their influence, then put in the word, offering to shut them down. She didn’t, however, remove the viruses from the infected computers.

  As her databases hit their limit, she turned to these other computers to handle more routine tasks.

  It took thirty minutes before the first hit registered. A traffic camera, a busload of young women. A row of identical faces, looking out the window. An unusual element, raising flags with the active programs. The faces took center stage as they were checked against a database. An image popped up: surveillance camera footage of a teenage girl in a shopping mall, followed by young men that each carried loads of packages.

  Eyebrows, brow to hairline length, nose length, eye width…

  The words popped up. Cherie Vasil.

  The Azazels relocated in an instant, firing every thruster to reposition themselves to hilltops and areas in the vicinity of the road. Long range cameras, infrared and electromagnetic resonance imaging gave Dragon eyes on the scene, verified what she was seeing twice over. No Nyx-crafted illusions fashioned of poisonous gas. No plastic surgery.

  Seven Cherishes. Two Crawlers. A King. Forty hostages of unknown status, a bus driver.

  The Azazels moved in to attack. One nano-thorn barricade was erected just in front of the bus. Calculations accounted for speed, distance, positioning of the passengers.

  The wheels disintegrated, popping as their exterior was penetrated. The bus tilted, and one side scraped right past the barricade. The Cherishes, taking up the window seats on the far right of the bus, made contact with it. Flesh dissolved just as steel and fiberglass did, sheared away. Not dead, but wounded, hurt enough they weren’t in a state to use their power. They wouldn’t survive the ensuing few minutes.

  The bus shifted, but hit the railing and didn’t tip over.

  A second Azazel opened fire with a cutting laser, separating the bus into two sections. The first Crawler was rising from his seat when the laser passed in front of him, cutting his face, chest and stomach. Blind, already regenerating, he tipped forward into the gap between the two sections of the bus. The Azazel was already laying down two rails that the nano thorns could spring from. The Crawler landed right on top of them, and was summarily reduced to a red mist.

  The second Crawler was more careful, grabbing a hostage and making his way out the gap. He hadn’t transformed into his truly monstrous self. Bipedal, the size of a bodybuilder, his face no longer human. A long tongue extended out between rows of teeth, and his throat was swollen with an acid sac, as though he had a goiter. Eyes surrounded his face, which was already bearing the rigidity and light armor plating that would intensify with further regeneration.

  His arms had already split into two limbs at the elbow, and each ended in claws. He used them for a grip on the metal to climb on the outside of the truck, penetrating metal with strong hands and sharp talons as he dragged his hostage along with him. He perched on the roof, holding the hostage over the disintegration field, staring at the second Azazel. Around him, a half-dozen cars and trucks had stopped in the face of the sudden attack, their daily lives interrupted.

  The first Azazel fired a glob of containment foam from behind the villain. Crawler hopped a little to one side as the short stream of foam passed him, and it struck the field to the left of the two-lane highway.

  A second stream hit his hostage, striking her out of his grasp and sending her flying straight into the first glob. She was sandwiched within, safe.

  Crawler turned just in time to see the first Azazel winging towards him. He moved to leap away, but a laser raked across his legs, severing them.

  He collapsed, gripping the steel of the bus roof with his claws to keep from falling. His legs were already regrowing, fractionally larger, more armored, the claws more prominent.

  He was struck by the Azazel that still approached, caught by a long tail and flung down at the ground. He rolled, and in doing so, he rolled into the same nano-thorn rails that had taken down his brother. Half of his body was disintegrated in an instant.

  It regenerated swiftly as he scrambled away on his three remaining limbs. This time, as the flesh swelled out and took form, there was a blur around his right arm, red, more at his shoulder, along his leg.

  The Azazel struck out with a tail, and he blocked the blow with the newly grown arm. The tail sheared off as it made contact with his newly grown defenses. The chunk of metal rolled into one of the cars further down the road. Still, Crawler stumbled from the force of the attack. To avoid being disintegrated, he drew his freshly altered arm back towards the barrier behind him. Where his blur met the blur that extended from the rail, the two nano-growths merely pressed against one another, almost springy, neither severing the other.

  He reached back with his unaffected arms and intentionally disintegrated them. They regrew, with alterations matching the ones he’d grown on the other side of the body. Better equipped, he stalked towards the Azazel that had laid down the rails, his back to the one that had struck him from the roof of the bus.

  He spoke, but Dragon’s software ran through the speech and eliminated it from the audio track. His mouth distorted on her visuals so there was no way to understand what he was saying.

  His target rose up, standing on its two rear legs. A severed tail helped give it balance.

  Then, before he could do anything further, the two Azazels launched a combination attack. A laser from the Azazel atop the bus made the Crawler’s own nano-thorn evolution burn away in an instant. In that same moment, the Azazel in front of him took off, firing every thruster. The force of the blast sent him flying back
into the barrier.

  Red mist.

  It only left King. The Azazels continued acting in concert, tearing the bus apart to get to the villain, peeling the roof back with a force that threw his gun arm skyward, preventing him from opening fire on the busload of hostages. Containment foam sealed him down.

  Of the various feeds that were devoted to individual members of the Nine, ten more shut off.

  The data altered further as Dragon relinquished control of the Azazels to her created A.I.s.

  Voice modelling program loading… Complete.

  “Ten more members of the Nine have been dealt with,” Dragon reported the victory on every channel. “Seven Cherishes and two Crawlers deceased, one King captured. Will move to containment and interrogate shortly.“

  ■

  Saint closed his eyes as he listened to the congratulations, the affirmations and praise.

  It was all hope mingled with horror, when he listened for what was beneath the surface. Minimal casualties. A few injuries – Vista and Crucible would be out of commission as Murder Rat’s venom continued to widen their wounds, and Golem was being treated for a burn. One Dragon’s Tooth had died, but the rest were holding positions, ready to support. Civilians were dying, but it was progress.

  He opened his eyes to take in the whole of Dragon’s work. Six widescreen monitors each tracked what she was doing with video images and white text on a black background. A slight movement of his foot on the trackpad in front of him shifted one of his cursors, changing the focus of the screens. He could see her directing the A.I. craft to more optimal locations, the related subroutines and tasks.

  Another shift of the cursor to alter the focus of the screens, and he could see the Birdcage. The house program followed every action of the residents, cataloged every conversation. A few clicks, and video feeds from the cameras in the Birdcage appeared in front of him.

  He leaned back in his padded computer chair, folding his hands on his stomach. Taking in Dragon’s data was tricky. She could turn her attention ten places at once, a hundred places at once, even if she only had agency in one place. To watch, to put himself in her shoes and look at the world through her eyes, Saint had to distance himself, to unfocus his eyes and his attention, to read the changing data without getting distracted by the text that moved fastest, or most drastically.

  The smell of rich coffee wafted over him as a hand settled on his face. A mug was set in front of him.

  He didn’t take his eyes off the screen, but when hands settled on his shoulders, he reached up to rest his own hand on one.

  “Progress?” she asked. She rested her chin on his head, looking at the screens.

  “Some, Mags,” he responded. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “Horrible stuff.”

  Saint shook his head. “It is. Doesn’t feel real.”

  “They’re censoring it, you know… Of course you know.”

  “Mmm hmm. They’ll stop as soon as everything goes through the proper channels. It was being censored so that the Triumvirate and unsanctioned major players could be kept out of the loop. Now they know.”

  “Any post, update or email that detailed anything about the attacks disappeared. Sites hacked, DDoSed, with data corrupted. You can’t delete data, I know, but you can fuck it up sufficiently. Couldn’t back anything up in a substantial way.”

  “Dragon’s work,” he said. He felt his pulse quicken a little at that.

  He shifted his foot, and once again, the screens changed their focus, the rest of the data shifting to miniature windows and moving to the periphery of the viewing area. The focus at the center was on the class-S threats. The Endbringers were stable, all in a resting state.

  Secondary focuses. Not the kind of targets that Dragon checked on with any regularity. Quarantine areas were silent and still. Canberra was sealed off under a dome, Madison was surrounded by walls. An area of wilderness in Alaska was marked off, but had no physical barriers to wall people away. There were no apparent issues in the vicinity of the interdimensional portals. Sleeper was, as far as anyone could identify anything about the threat, dormant. The Three Blasphemies were active, but the damage was being managed by the European capes. A temporary measure had been taken with Purity and her three year old daughter, with observation being provided for her by the PRT, and the feed showed her sitting on the couch in an apartment or hotel room, two very normal, plain looking people standing in the corner of the room with some PRT officers keeping their distance. No crises. Normal, as much as such could be normal.

  And then there was Nilbog. The data focused around him. The city was quiet, and the roads leading into the city were being watched by satellite. Simulations, damage estimates and risk assessments were being run, old data being gathered, with essential data highlighted. It took her only a moment to put it into a format that was easily readable. An instant later, it was gone. He’d blinked, failing to look in the right spot, and had missed the moment the data had been emailed out. The file would inform everyone on the home team about who Nilbog was and how he operated.

  He captured a copy of the file for himself, then swept away the traces with his blue box program.

  “They think this is the endgame,” Saint commented. “Pulling out all the stops, removing the limiters.”

  “It’s working. They’re beating the Nine.”

  “They’re beating the Nine that Jack sent out there to beat. He’s holding back the more dangerous ones, like the Gray Boys or Siberian, and he hasn’t sent every single clone of a particular type out there Eight Cherishes are dead, but there should be nine in total, if the numbers on the bodies aren’t misleading.”

  “They could be. The pig prank?”

  Saint nodded. The pig prank involved letting three pigs into a school after hours, each painted with a big number on their sides; one, two and four, respectively. The idea was that the people who had to find and capture the pigs would spend ages trying to find the third.

  Jack’s version would be less lighthearted, letting everyone believe there were nine, when there were more in reserve. Casualties would ensue.

  “It could be that he intends to surround himself with a core group, with one of each previous member of the Nine, for a final showdown. Before he pulls out the big guns.”

  “And Nilbog?”

  “A distraction, perhaps. Jack knows he’s supposed to end the world. With the scale he’s operating at, he seems to believe it, even if some of us don’t. He wouldn’t put too many eggs in such an unreliable, unpredictable basket. He has to have something else in mind for ending the world.”

  Saint took a sip of his coffee. For a moment, he let himself eye Mags in the reflections at the edge of the monitor. Her face was dark, lips full, her eyes large. More than anything though, she had bearing. She wasn’t wearing her armor, but even in the bodysuit, a person without powers, she had a kind of pride and confidence that some capes lacked. The hexagonal contacts where the bodysuit would connect to the armor still glowed with residual energy.

  Dobrynja approached from the other end of the office. He was wearing his armor. He’d started out with the Wyvern suit, but now wore the Wyrmiston suit. It was based on the technology they’d recovered from a destroyed model, the one Dragon called Pythios. A wheel slowly rotated on his back.

  “You’re ready for battle,” Saint commented. He turned his eyes back to the screen. Dragon had eyes on Jack. He’d missed just how she’d narrowed things down, but there were no less than three cameras watching one vehicle as it sped down a lonely road.

  “Feels like a fighting day,” Dobrynja answered. “Don’t you feel it? Like an old man feels a storm in his bones. Trouble.”

  Saint smiled. “You’ve said that before, that there’s trouble on the way.”

  “I’ve been right.”

  “You’ve been wrong, too. Not that I’m arguing. Your gut isn’t saying anything that common sense isn’t screaming.”

  “Mass murders in three locations,” Mags said.


  “More to come,” Saint said. He frowned. Dragon was employing a full offensive, aiming to cut Jack off from Ellisburg. Incidents were being reported in Norfolk, Connecticut and Redfield, New York. The heroes divided further, to attend to each of the crises. Dragon’s Teeth and Chicago Wards to one location, Brockton Bay residents to another.

  “Dragon? It’s Weaver.” The voice came through the speakers.

  “It should be over before you can get this far, Weaver.”

  “I still want to come. We’ve got to get these hostages sorted out, and I can leave in a minute.“

  “You’ll only be allowed to watch from afar, if there’s even anything to watch. Quarantine applies to you too.”

  “I know.“

  “I’ll give you the coordinates for the interception area. You can watch with Golem. He’s coming too. It’ll be on your computer in a moment.”

  The call ended, and the images and text boxes shifted as that particular window closed.

  A map briefly appeared, then disappeared, a transition so fast it could have been a stroke of lightning.

  “Seems anticlimactic,” Mags commented.

  “Everything does, from this side of the screen,” Saint said. He stood, holding his coffee, “Adjusting for the time delay between what I’m seeing and what Dragon’s doing, we’ve got six minutes more before Dragon intercepts Jack at the edge of Nilbog’s territory. Twelve minutes until Golem and Weaver get there. They’ll fight Jack, and somewhere in the midst of that, we may see the end of the world.”

  “And we can’t do anything?”

  “Not unless we can get to Vermont in a matter of minutes.”

  Mags frowned.

  Still standing by his chair, coffee in hand, Saint sighed, “I’m going to go water the toilet. Watch things?”

  Mags nodded, then seated herself in his chair at the station.

  Saint entered the bathroom, fumbled his way past the zipper in his bodysuit and his underwear, then leaned against the wall with one hand, using the other to keep the stream on target. He closed his eyes, and he could almost see the shadows of the data against the back of his eyelids, black words on a pale pink background.