by John McCrae
“You fucking looked at my records?”
“…More violent than most people would be, in her shoes. Lashing out, aimlessly at first, and then with a target, channeling the aggression. Except it was the same amount of violence, just concentrated into fewer incidents, alongside a pretty extensive bullying campaign.”
“You’re doing this because of a grudge?”
“Let’s do it,” Tattletale said. “Go with our guts. Imp and Shadow Stalker, up on the roof. Bitch, either you or Bastard need to head over to the Pendragon. Canary on the roof of the Pendragon, singing with nobody listening.”
“You’re not getting me outside or any of that shit,” Shadow Stalker said.
“You’re scared,” Imp said. “That’s so cute! Is it a fear of heights or a fear of the Simurgh?”
“I’m not scared,” Shadow Stalker replied. “I’m being sensible. This is lunacy, and for what? Charades with the Endbringer?”
“That was a metaphor,” Tattletale said.
“It sounds fucking stupid.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Imp said. “I’m going. I’m not going to get lumped in with Sissy McNancypants over here and get called a coward.”
“I’m not scared,” Shadow Stalker said.
“We never really got to meet,” Imp said. “Fight or any of that. So I’ve only got the stories I’ve heard about you. Like when you shot Grue with your crossbow and it went right through his stomach? Took him a month to recover? I used to think, you know, you were a badass. But you’re a pussycat.”
“She’s a bully,” I said. “At the end of the day, she only wants to fight opponents she knows she can beat.”
“I’ve fought two Endbringers,” Shadow Stalker said, stabbing a finger in my direction. “I know what you’re trying to do. Fucking manipulating me, getting me into a dangerous situation where you’ll get me killed. Fuck you.”
“Fought two Endbringers as part of an army. But going up alone, putting yourself in the line of fire against something that much bigger and stronger than you? No. You’re a bully at heart, and that’s the antithesis of your usual M.O.”
“Fuck you, Hebert. Fuck you.”
The sentence left her mouth, and then she stalked to my right, making her way to the cockpit. She passed through the glass, making her way onto the nose of the ship, where she crouched. Her flapping cloak obstructed the view, even as translucent as it was, but there was no chance we’d hit anything.
It took a minute to arrange. Narwhal created a force field platform and carefully moved Rachel over to the Pendragon. I watched their glacially slow movement and the utterly still Simurgh.
More alarms went off as she moved her head a fraction to watch the floating platform.
It took a few long seconds for my heart to stop trying to jump out of my chest. Not completely oblivious to us petty humans.
“The girl is right. This seems… ridiculous,” Lung rumbled.
Oh, Lung and Shadow Stalker are of like mind, that’s wonderful.
“It is, just a little,” Tattletale said. “But I’m hoping that if this doesn’t exactly work, she’ll give us credit for trying.”
“The Endbringers do not give you credit,” Lung said.
“No, guess not,” Tattletale said. She bent down to scratch Bastard around the ears, then stopped short when he pulled back, clearly uncomfortable with the stranger.
“Ridiculous,” Lung repeated himself. “And you stopped in the middle of a conversation. She is waiting for you to continue.”
“She doesn’t care. Ninety-nine percent sure. Gotta understand, she’s not even close to human, especially once you scratch the surface. We think in black and white, she thinks in… void and substance. In abstracts or in causative contexts, looking into the future and seeing how things unfold. So we’re going to try this, and maybe something sticks.”
“Mm,” Lung said, clearly unimpressed.
“Start us up again?” Tattletale asked me.
I nodded.
“So, Simmy, Eidolon made you, or he’s been enough of an opponent that you’ve kind of got that weird frenemy thing going on. Not in the shitty high school way, but a real love-hate relationship. You know what I mean. You fight them so long you get to know them, you almost respect them on a level, and that respect becomes something more.”
“You’re rambling,” I murmured.
Tattletale shook her head a little. “Whatever the case, you’re reacting to his being gone. We’re here because we’re asking you…”
Tattletale trailed off. She’d noticed something.
My head turned. Canary was singing, and I could hear it through my bugs.
Wordless, insistent, filled with a lot of repressed emotion.
Almost angry.
I shut it out as best as I could, took a second to focus wholly on keeping my power from communicating any sound to me. I hit a button on the dashboard, then spent a few seconds tracking down one of Dragon’s programs.
Defiant found it first, loading it onto the Dragonfly’s system. It began filtering out the singing. Most of it.
But no sooner had Canary’s Song gone away than the Simurgh began screaming.
Not as intense as I’d heard it described. Barely audible.
More ominous than anything.
“Not full strength,” Miss Militia’s voice came over the comms. “I give us five minutes. Wrap this up.”
I unclenched my hands, belatedly realizing I’d been squeezing them so hard they almost hurt. My fingernails throbbed where they’d been almost bent against my palms. If I’d not been wearing my gloves, I might have pierced the skin. I flexed my hands to work out the tension that had accumulated and exhaled slowly.
“We’re here,” Tattletale started again, “Because we’re asking you for help. For vengeance. For your strength. We want you and the rest of the Endbringers on board to stop Scion.”
The Simurgh didn’t react.
“I don’t care if you’re doing it to fuck with us, though I’d prefer it if you saved any backstabbing for when Scion’s dead and gone. Fucking wipe us out. I don’t care. Just so long as we go out with a bang, taking him out with us.”
I made a hand gesture, urging Tattletale to move on.
“…Do it for the psychological impact, leave a mark. Or do it because Scion killed Behemoth, your brother, and some part of you is programmed with a sense of kinship or whatever. But above all else, I’m hoping you’ll help us murder that golden alien motherfucker because he killed Eidolon, and he stripped you of your purpose.”
Sixty percent sure, I thought. Tattletale had revised her number. How confident was she now?
The speech had no meat to it if Eidolon hadn’t made the Endbringers.
Very little if he had.
Tattletale held up her hand to me again, another sign that I shouldn’t repeat what she was saying, because she was talking to us. “Fuck this. It’s like talking to a fucking answering machine. I feel like some dim asshole with no idea what I’m talking about. There’s no feedback, no responses to read and judge for the next line.”
“Well,” I said. “She’s not exactly your usual target.”
“What do you usually do?“ Narwhal asked.
“Needle someone until they get upset, then find cues in that. I’d do that here, except irritating the Simurgh seems like an excuse to get a Darwin Award.”
“Tattletale’s being cautious. Must be the end of the world after all,” someone said. Might have been Foil.
“She’s singing,” Tattletale said. “So that’s either a good sign or a very bad sign.”
“Going by the numbers,” Miss Militia said, “If we assume it’s half strength, I’d say three minutes before we have to abort.“
“Maybe tell Canary to stop,” I said.
“No,” Tattletale said. “We’re getting a response. Let’s hold out.”
“Then keep talking,” Defiant said.
Tattletale sighed. She perched herself on the bench, hand
s on her head. “I don’t know if I should continue buying into this Eidolon thing. Less convinced the further we go. Most times, you get that key piece of information, and you can coast from there.”
“It’s very possible we don’t have enough information,” I said.
“I’m trying to communicate with something that doesn’t communicate back,” Tattletale said.
“Reduce,” Defiant said. “We’re trying to convey a message to a being that we don’t wholly understand. You’re appealing to sympathy, to revenge. Something simpler?“
“Like?” Tattletale asked.
“They have a sense of self preservation,” Narwhal said. “They run when we hurt them enough. Fear?“
“Because it allows them to maintain their mission,” Tattletale said. “I don’t think we can actually scare her, either. Scion might, but we can’t.”
The screaming was getting worse. Warbling, with highs and lows. It snagged on my attention, making it harder to maintain a train of thought.
Maybe she was reaching out to us, communicating. Maybe she was just doing her thing, trying to worm her way into our heads so she could figure out how we functioned, put her plans into motion.
“Anger,” Rachel said.
I turned my head.
There was a long pause. I glanced at the screen on the cockpit to see what she was doing, but she’d stopped by the time I got there to look. “When I cut Behemoth’s leg off, after we’d melted most of him away, he was angry. Stomped around, attacked more. Kept fighting until he died. Didn’t he?“
“He did,” Tattletale said. “But now we’re getting back to the whole ‘needling them’ issue of the debate. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to provoke her.”
“Dunno,” Rachel said. “Just saying.”
“No,” I said, “It’s good thinking. It’s a possibility.”
I could think back to the images of the Simurgh going all-out.
I remembered the various incidents that had unfolded in her wake. Echidna, the sundering of the PRT. Things with ramifications that were affecting us even now.
“…A very scary possibility,” I amended.
Lung gave me a funny look.
“Yes,” he said, agreeing with me.
Tattletale made a gesture, pointing at herself.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Okay, Ziz. I’m going to be honest. You’re pretty fucked. You and I both know you were made by somebody or something. Accidentally, probably. You were designed to give us as hard a time as possible without exterminating us altogether, probably to feed someone’s ego, unbeknownst to them. But what happens when we’re all gone? What’s the fucking point of you?”
Tattletale paused. Waiting, watching.
No reaction from Tattletale.
“What happens when we’re all gone? You’re tapped into a power source. Maybe most power sources. You’re draining them dry just to keep yourselves going. There’s nothing for you to do but linger, when there’s no humans left. To hibernate. So you’re gathering your forces. You’re planning one last act, probably for a few days from now, where you wipe out humanity, and I’m betting it’s one last desperate, sad attempt to validate your existence.”
Alarms went off once more. The Simurgh had moved, her head turning to look over one shoulder, flexing wings to move them out of the way, as if she couldn’t see through them but she could see well past the horizon.
She returned to the same posture as before.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“Checking,” Defiant said. “Keep going. Any reaction is a good reaction.”
Maybe it was Scion, arriving just in time to pick a fight with the Simurgh.
I could hope.
Tattletale continued, and I repeated what she was saying verbatim, trying to even match her in tone and pitch. “Here’s what I’m thinking. Shot in the dark. You’re wanting to fight humanity because you’re trying to carry out the old programming, and Scion invalidated that by killing Eidolon, by killing someone else or destroying something. I think that fighting and nearly killing a few billion humans is the equivalent of fighting and nearly killing Eidolon. Or whoever.”
“One hundred and eighty integers of longitude to the west,” Defiant said. “Leviathan just arrived. That’s what got her attention. We expected one to appear there, so Chevalier ordered us to put crews there with cameras for monitoring. They’re there right now, reporting to me.”
A monitor shifted, depicting Leviathan, standing on the water’s surface in the midst of a heavy rainstorm. The water around him was rippling, though he was utterly still.
Tattletale continued without pause, not responding or reacting to this information. “All I’m saying, all I’m proposing, is that Scion’s a better bet than we are. You want to give someone a fucking hard time? Make that someone Scion. You want to terrorize people? Terrorize Scion. Bigger challenge, and you’ll probably have the rest of us fucking scared out of our minds if you pull it off. You want to fucking end the world? Get in line, chickadee, because Scion’s going to beat you to the punch if you don’t stop him.”
Tattletale was almost breathless, speaking faster, with more emotion. It was a challenge to convey that with a voice generated by the swarm.
“Or maybe you don’t care. Maybe you’re nothing more than what you appear to be on the surface. Head games and taking credit for shit you didn’t do. Maybe you’re just a projection, blank between the ears, mindless, heartless, pointless.”
The ship moved a fraction, then adjusted, the autopilot kicking in.
“Did you feel that?” I asked. Tattletale had gone silent, and there were no words left for me to translate.
“We did.“
A reaction? I adjusted the monitors, turning everything back to the Simurgh, looking for any clue, any hint.
But she didn’t have body language. Every action was deliberate. She didn’t have any that weren’t.
Tattletale’s voice was low. I did what I could to match it, speaking through a swarm of over a million individual insects and arachnids. “You’re supposedly this magnificent genius, and this is how you go out? With a whimper? Petering out like a stream without a source? You’re honestly telling me there isn’t anything more to you?”
Another rumble, another shift, somewhat more violent.
“Enough, Tattletale.” Defiant’s voice.
“They run on different patterns. Fair bit of anger, room for some vengeance. Cleverness, sure. More in her than in Behemoth. Some killer instinct, maybe… a blend of fear and caution. Not so they’re afraid, but so they can temper their actions. This? Right here? It’s the closest we’re about to get to communicating directly with a passenger.”
“I understand,” Defiant said. “But that’s enough.“
“They’re passengers?” I asked.
“The shell? No. The outer shell, the concept, the execution, they’re tapping into religious metaphors. The devil, the serpent, the angel, buddha, mother earth, the maiden, each connected in turn to fundamental forces. Flame, water, fate, time, earth, the self. Things deep-seated and fundamental to their creator’s belief system, because that’s how the passengers interpret our world. Through us. But deep down? Beyond that surface, beyond the basic programming that drives them to do what they’ve been doing for thirty years? It’s the passenger’s brush strokes. And I’m getting to her.”
“No you’re not,” Defiant said. “Because you’re stopping now.“
“Fuck that,” Tattletale said.
“You’re stopping now because it worked.”
One by one, the monitors throughout the Dragonfly shifted, until the one at the very front was the only one that still showed the Simurgh.
The Dragonfly changed course as we looked at the scene that was showing on every other monitor.
The Azazel, airborne. D.T. officers within were standing by the windows, while one with a camera was holding it above their heads, aiming it towards the window, pointed at the water.
A dark mass was beneath.
Leviathan, matching pace with the ship.
The Dragonfly and Pendragon broke from their orbit around the Simurgh.
The Simurgh followed.
■
The Yàngbǎn tore through the settlement, barely visible, as fast as arrows loosed from a bow.
One set of powers to give them speed, another to give them the ability to create crude images, illusions, blurry and indistinct.
A weak power, but far less so when coupled with the fact that they were making themselves just as blurry and indistinct. To top it off, they were making themselves invisible for fractions of a second, and they were lashing out with short blades of cutting energy when they reappeared, slicing through the Australian refugees.
Bombs went off, coordinated, ripping through the spaces the Yàngbǎn had already passed through, cleaning up the ones who’d survived, killing the rescue personnel who were trying to save lives.
Earth Tav, barely two million people spread out across the globe, with this being the largest population center, based around the portal that Faultline, Labyrinth and Scrub had erected.
Without this base for supplies and communication, the other settlements would falter. Disease would be crippling, food would be scarce at best.
And the Yàngbǎn would no doubt reap the rewards, claiming the planet for the C.U.I.
The Pendragon led the way through the portal, and it suffered the brunt of the bombs that the Yàngbǎn had left in their wake, no doubt to stop any reinforcements.
The Pendragon sank, no longer fully airborne, and the Dragonfly’s cameras could see as Golem, Vista and Cuff did what they could to patch it together.
Not enough. It landed, hard.
Another bomb went off as the Pendragon hit ground. Had the Yàngbǎn plotted that? A second line of defense?
“Everyone okay?” I asked.
“Give us a minute. Nobody dead.“
At least the Pendragon was a combat ship, meant to take a beating. If the Dragonfly had been the first one through, we would have been obliterated. At best, we’d have managed to evacuate with parachutes, flight packs and shadow-form powers.