by John McCrae
“Yeah,” I said. “Yes. Right. I’m listening.”
“It’s video footage Glaistig Uaine left with me. Last two minutes of Eidolon’s life. Video cuts in and out, but there’s audio. That leaves me maybe a minute or two to explain, then you can use the rest of the time to think it over.”
She had my attention, though I couldn’t take my eyes off the monitors at the front of the ship. Shadow Stalker’s cries of anger were background noise.
The Pendragon was flying alongside us, just a little behind, carrying the capes Defiant had recruited. Carrying Saint, Canary, and others.
Tattletale loaded up the video, filling the screen of the laptop.
I glanced once at the main monitor, then set the autopilot.
Faultline had talked about taking the simple route. Talking to Scion. In practice, harder than it seemed.
We were dealing with problems on a massive scale, we needed solutions on that same level. There was no easy way to get to that level. It meant taking risks. Gambling.
We needed a destructive force we could direct. Needed to turn third-party liabilities into assets.
With that in mind, I’d set course straight for the Simurgh. We’d talk to her or we’d kill her.
Tattletale started the video, and I watched.
28.04
“We’re here,” I said.
It was enough. All the different personalities in the Dragonfly, the… how had Tattletale put it, once upon a time? The people who weren’t inclined to play ‘cops and robbers’, who weren’t the types to follow the rules or codes, and were dangerous without a firm hand. Rachel, Lung, Sophia… they fell silent. The fighting stopped.
Because they, even with their unique and personal issues, acknowledged that this wasn’t a situation where you fucked around.
Monitors switched settings without any cue from me. Showing the Simurgh from a distance away, from a different angle. Defiant had switched on his long-ranged cameras.
A moment later, he switched on the cameras in the Dragonfly. The two sets of images alternated across the innumerable displays in the craft. Only the display directly in front of me in the cockpit remained untouched, showing altitude, heading, speed, distance from target, and alerts regarding Scion’s latest appearances.
The Dragonfly changed course, angling to maintain a set distance from the Endbringer. Again, not me.
Defiant seemed content to handle the mechanical end of things. I stood from my seat, stretching a little, before gathering my bugs. Two relay bugs, for safety’s sake. They exited the craft.
No scream from the Simurgh. At least, not one I could detect. It would fit her to keep it beyond our notice, influencing us, the sort of card she would keep up her sleeve. To make the psychic scream ‘audible’, for lack of a better word, purely for spreading fear, then use it subtly at a time when she wasn’t attacking.
The others in the ship hadn’t only gone silent. They’d gone still. I might have taken it for an almost hypnotic paralysis, a sign that something was deeply wrong, but Rachel turned and found a seat on the bench opposite Shadow Stalker.
No, they were still themselves.
My bugs made their way towards the Simurgh, while I chained the two relay bugs together to extend my range.
Fragile, as it only required the death of one bug to sever my connection with the swarm. I didn’t mind. If she acted on my swarm, that was likely to be the least of our worries.
Cameras changed focus, zooming in on the Simurgh’s face, hands and various wingtips, different cameras taking over as the Pendragon and the Dragonfly rotated around her and the cameras lost sight of the features in question. Mosaic views of her features, broken up like I might see if I were looking through the eyes of my bugs, but without my power to coodinate the picture, draw it into something cohesive.
In the corner of each image, metrics, numbers, measurements, as if Defiant hoped to track the slightest movement.
It was the hair that got me. Gossamer-fine, silver-white, straight, it blew in the wind as if each strand were a separate entity. Not in clumps or locks, but a curtain of strands ten times as dramatic as something one might see in a digitally altered hair commercial.
Artificial.
“Seventy,” Tattletale said.
“Hm?” I asked.
“I said I was sixty-five percent sure before. I’m revising it to seventy.”
I nodded.
Hello, Simurgh, I thought. We finally meet.
The Protectorate was strict about who could join the fights against the Simurgh. Capes needed psychological evaluations, they needed to sign documents agreeing to the quarantine procedures, and they needed to be on board with the timetables.
I’d been unable to participate when the Simurgh had attacked flight BA178. When she’d attacked Manchester, I’d been barred from joining the fight by bureaucratic red tape. I had a bad history and I was still on probation. Too likely that I was mentally unstable.
When the Simurgh had hit Paris, I’d gone to Mrs. Yamada, hoping for a therapist’s bill of clean mental health. Or, if not quite that, then at least a go-ahead.
She’d advised me to see it as a good thing, instead. That my participation would be another black mark on my record, another reason for people to be suspicious of me or second guess my decisions.
She’d also very elegantly avoided spelling out that she wasn’t willing to give me that clean bill of mental health. I’d noticed, but hadn’t pressed her on it. She would have been forced to say it straight, and I would have had to hear her say it.
“Ready?” I asked.
“I do the talking, you pass it on,” Tattletale said.
I nodded.
Tattletale sighed. “Look at her. The folly of man, am I right?”
“I don’t know. You have a better idea about whether you’re right, but it… doesn’t fit to me.”
“I’m sure.”
“You’re seventy percent sure.”
“Seventy percent, yes. If I’m wrong, then I’ll be approaching this entire conversation from the wrong angle, and we might wind up siccing an otherwise passive Endbringer on humanity.”
“Let’s hope you’re right, then,” I said.
She nodded.
“Everyone ready?” I asked. I looked around the craft. No responses. Only silent nods.
One head that was shaking. Shadow Stalker.
I touched the screen on the console. “Defiant?”
“Ready when you are,” he said.
“We’re starting right now,” I said. I nodded at Tattletale.
She rolled her shoulders, took in a deep breath, then sighed. “Hello, Endbringer, this-”
I echoed her words, speaking through my bugs as an interpreter might speak in another language.
The instant I had the first word out, alarms went off throughout the ship. The Dragonfly shuddered as meager weapons unfolded from the sides. My visual of the Pendragon showed it was reacting much the same way.
Simurgh had reacted.
She hadn’t attacked, but she had reacted.
She rotated in the air, holding her position, wings flat at her sides. The wings were purely ornamental, much as Behemoth’s bulk and musculature had been. She used telekinesis to move, and she used it now to keep herself oriented in the air, rotating so she matched our orbit around her, her eyes and attention fully fixed on the Dragonfly.
“Oh, shit,” Imp spoke, her voice wavering breathlessly halfway through the ‘shit’.
Long seconds passed, but the Simurgh didn’t take any other action.
“Th- this is Tattletale speaking, one face in that vast, crazy crowd of humans you’ve been murdering,” Tattletale finished. “Good to see you’re listening. I thought it was about time we had a chat.”
No response, no movement. Odd, to see the screens showing her depicting the zoomed-in images of her face, hands, wings and body and not see them rotating in the picture as they had been before.
Her expression was neutral
, but then again, the Simurgh’s expression was always neutral. A face like a doll’s, a cold stare. Beautiful in every conventional sense, in that every classically attractive feature was there, from the delicate, thin frame to the high cheekbones to the luxurious hair… horrifying in the manner it was all framed. The height that put her two to three times the height of an ordinary adult, the wings that filled the space around her. The feathers were surprisingly tough and dense, the edges capable of scoring steel.
Not that she really fought in close quarters, where she could help it.
“Let’s face the facts, Simurgh. Ziz. Israfel. Ulama. Whatever you want to go by. You started acting funny pretty much right away, after Eidolon bit it. Maybe that’s mourning. Maybe you respected him as an enemy, ’cause he was one of only two individuals who could really give you guys a run for your money. Or maybe you had a different relationship.”
Tattletale let the words hang in the air.
“Maybe a parent-child relationship? Maybe he created you.”
The Simurgh didn’t move a muscle. Her hair blew in the wind, and it caught on the features of her face, not even eliciting a blink of her eyes.
I leaned over my chair to hit the button on my cockpit, giving me a view of the inside of the Pendragon.
Defiant, Narwhal, Miss Militia, Saint, Canary, Parian, Foil, Golem, Vista and Kid Win were all present within. Defiant had collected the heroes, the capes who might have been less inclined to throw their hat into the ring if I showed up in the company of Tattletale, Imp and Rachel. He’d been closer to Parian and Foil when I approached him with the plan.
I watched the expressions on their faces, the concern, the alarm and confusion I’d felt only minutes ago. I knew Tattletale hadn’t shared this particular detail. They had to be listening in with some microphone, either a directional one aimed at my swarm outside or one in the Dragonfly.
“They say loneliness breeds the best masters, and it’s awfully lonely at the top,” Tattletale said. “Nobody that can really put up a fight, no excuse to flex his abilities to their fullest, nothing that can really give the man any real stature, next to Legend, who had all the face time with the media. No real role to play, compared to Alexandria, who was managing the PRT. Odd man out.”
I thought of Eidolon, the first time I’d seen him in person. Meeting in preparation for the Leviathan fight in Brockton Bay… Eidolon had been standing off to one side, in a corner, lost in thought.
“Symbiotic, odd as it sounds, what with you trying to kill him and him trying to kill you.”
Still no reaction. No response.
I noted the surroundings. The Simurgh had situated herself above the ocean, an eerie parallel to how Scion had first appeared before humanity. As battlegrounds went, it left her relatively little to manipulate when using her telekinesis, but it also gave us very little ground to stand on if a fight erupted. She’d torn apart Flight BA178. She could tear apart the Dragonfly or the Pendragon if she had a mind to.
Hopefully the other ship would be able to flee, if we couldn’t manage an outright fight.
Tattletale held up a hand, then spoke. “She’s not giving me anything.”
I didn’t repeat it for the Simurgh. I only stared at the screens.
“Did you expect her to?” Imp asked.
“Yeah. Kind of,” Tattletale said.
“She’s not human,” I said. “And, if you’re right about this, she’s only a projection. Her brain doesn’t work like ours does, if it’s even active.”
“She responded when we communicated,” Tattletale said.
I nodded. “Defiant, you listening in?”
On the screen in front of us, Defiant turned to the camera, then nodded once.
“Open to suggestions,” I said.
“We could use powers to try and communicate,” Narwhal said. “Can we express a signal through some other channel? Through our powers?”
“It might be taken as an attack,” I said.
“She’s smart enough to figure out convoluted chains of cause and effect, but not to take a gesture of communication for what it is?” Tattletale asked. “I say we try it.”
“Oh my god,” Shadow Stalker said, her voice quiet. “You’re going to get us all killed.”
“Well, it might be a mercy,” Imp said. “Going out like that, not having to watch the golden man take humanity down piece by piece.”
“Could we try Canary?” I suggested. “If she has any understanding of powers, or if Canary has any influence with things other than humans…”
“I don’t,” Canary said, from within the Pendragon. “I tried using my power on dogs, cats, birds, monkeys…“
Tattletale nodded, like this was something expected. “Bonesaw said something like that. When we get our powers, the passenger manages this sort of scan, trying to figure out a way to apply a part of itself. So Taylor gets a power that’s restricted to bugs, Canary gets a power that’s limited to people. At the same time, the passenger kind of figures out if there’s any danger of the power harming us, physically or mentally, and it sets down safeguards and limits. Headaches like Dinah or I get are part of that. And Eidolon…”
“I don’t… I can’t believe all this,” a woman said. Miss Militia.
“He’s really their creator?” Defiant asked. “Eidolon?”
“…Sixty percent sure. Eidolon’s some kind of exception, on a lot of levels. His power works by different vectors, the innate limits aren’t there… something broke, and I’m betting the Endbringers are tied to it. Like, this entity is fissioning off into countless fragments that impregnate hosts and somehow a little extra gets tacked on. Or Cauldron’s method of replicating the fragments gets that little extra.”
“Yes,” Defiant said. “But how does that help us here?”
“Getting to that. Sort of. Every power has secondary uses, uses that are locked away. But maybe there’s something we can express using the powers, like a kind of parahuman charades. Not, you know, actually miming something, but giving off a vibe.”
“I’ll try whatever,” I said. “Who? How?”
Tattletale smiled. “Oh, this is fun. It’s like a puzzle, but it’s not one with a clear cut answer. Rachel, Canary. Um. Imp too. And Taylor’s right. Any use of power in a way that could be seen as violent might give the wrong cue. So… none of that. Let’s move people between ships. Bitch, to the Pendragon. Leave Bastard behind. Canary, can you get out on top of your ship? And Imp, same for you. We need to distance you from the rest of us.”
“Outside?” Imp asked.
“Outside and away. Where your power doesn’t necessarily have a target. You get me?”
“Three people using their powers,” Defiant said, “Without any valid targets?”
“Exactly,” Tattletale said.
“I could lose my bugs,” I said. “But I’m not sure I can express my power in a case like that.”
“Even if you could, but that would be pretty heavy handed. It’s what we try next if this fails. For now, let’s work with the existing plan.”
I pulled off my flight pack, then handed it to Imp.
“Oh, fun,” she said. “God damn it.”
“No quips? No jokes?” I asked. I helped her find the buckles and straps.
“When I’m done, maybe,” Imp said. She glanced at Tattletale. “I can’t turn my power on. It’s always on. I can turn it off, but that only works so long as I’m paying attention.”
“Don’t pay attention then. Leave it running. We’re trying to express an attitude.”
Imp nodded.
“What attitude is Imp?” I asked.
“Nonviolence, passivity,” Tattletale said. “At least as far as we’re concerned.”
“And Rachel?”
“A call to arms, expression of strength.”
“And Canary is… cooperation?”
“Something along those lines.”
I nodded.
Tattletale shrugged. “Lung would be too violent, and the f
ocus of Vista’s power is too… location-driven? I have no idea how she’d take Narwhal’s power, because it’s pretty evenly split between offense and defense.”
“Kind of abstract,” I said.
“I’m… reaching,” Tattletale confessed. “Definitely reaching. But reaching and abstract thought bought us the portal to Gimel, and I’ve got to flex my power somehow.”
“Somehow,” I agreed. “No, it’s worth a try. Or it will be if it doesn’t provoke her to violently murder us all. Can I make a suggestion, though?”
“Any suggestions are good,” Tattletale said.
“Send Shadow Stalker instead of Imp.”
“You bitch,” Shadow Stalker said. “No.”
“Awesome idea,” Imp said.
“Shadow Stalker’s power doesn’t express itself over an area or any particular medium,” Tattletale said. “It’s more personal.”
“Can’t she represent us?” I asked. “Or can’t the personal effect represent us? If we had Imp flying up there way out of range of any of us, we’re still expecting her to represent our group, or humanity as a whole, aren’t we?”
“Sort of,” Tattletale said.
“Then I’m not sure I see the difference,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Shadow Stalker said. “This is moronic. Charades and acting like powers are some kind of massive signal flag for the Endbringer? You’re lunatics.”
“Send them both?” I suggested.
“Oh, that’s less fun,” Imp said. “You had a working plan, and you’re letting Tattletale convince you otherwise. Come on. Send the psycho crossbow girl and I’ll hang back here. My power would send the total wrong message. Totally.”
“Shh,” Tattletale said. She frowned. “Why Shadow Stalker?”
“Because Imp… is too passive.”
“Way too passive,” Imp murmured.
“So’s Shadow Stalker,” Tattletale said.
“But Shadow Stalker’s passenger isn’t. If there are any undertones, any way that the passengers influence our actions, then Shadow Stalker was definitely influenced. I dug through her old records, read up on her history.”
“What?” Shadow Stalker asked.
“She got aggressive after she got her powers. Generally more…” I searched for the way to phrase it.