Worm

by John McCrae

  The cheers became screams of fear and panic as Shadow Stalker’s bolts started hitting the special capes. Sniping them.

  Three shots, and then someone retaliated. A sonic attack, focused. The crossbow bolts stopped appearing.

  She’s dead? Just like that?

  No. More crossbow bolts, from a different vantage point. Fired from within walls, Shadow Stalker poking a barely visible head out into gloom to get a bead, then firing at her targets.

  “Go,” I said. “Shadow Stalker, Lung, we’re moving. Cover our retreat, follow us if you can.”

  No response from either. They were busy doing what they were doing.

  I could feel the Custodians appearing.

  A vast quantity. Filling empty spaces, overlapping.

  A duplicator? I thought.

  Like Velocity, the Brockton Bay Protectorate member who’d died against Leviathan. He’d been a fast cape, capable of outrunning vehicles, striking a hundred times in a minute. But that came at the expense of a limited ability to affect the world.

  The Custodian was the same.

  She was weak, standalone, barely a wisp of air. And she couldn’t turn it off. Couldn’t get back to a state where she was fully material, capable of affecting the world normally.

  But she duplicated, combined her strength, made hundreds of herself, thousands…

  She tore into the crowd like an elemental force. My bugs could feel the air ripple, felt prisoners get thrown into cells.

  Felt the blood, the limbs being bent in ways that wasn’t possible, when they refused to be thrown.

  Energy attacks cut through the open air, and she barely slowed down.

  The remaining special case fifty-threes from the floor below started to attack, to use abilities I couldn’t quantify as sound or fire or lightning, and the Custodian let hundreds of duplicates disappear in her attempts to get out of the way.

  We headed out of the corridor. “You two,” I ordered the shirtless duo. “Help defend us.”

  Between the dogs, Golem and Cuff, we had the brawn to force ourselves through the crowd that was in the area Lung had walled off. Surprise, too, went a long way. I didn’t have a lot of bugs, but I had enough to blind a few people, to fill their noses and ears and distract.

  When Lung turned his fire on the group that was standing their ground, readying to stop us, that was a breaking point. They scattered. Two remained, tough and stubborn enough to keep attacking, and Lung picked one of them up, swinging them like a flail to bludgeon the other aside.

  Golem’s hands shoved more away. Cuff’s strikes, using her ability to manipulate metal and her metal gloves, were enough to break bone. She shattered legs and arms, struck ribs and threw people aside.

  I wasn’t proud, but I knew that this cold, efficient ruthlessness was at least partially a result of the time we’d spent together.

  Imp caught up with us. She had a sphere tucked under one arm, with the coiling mass of Weld’s partner within, still moving.

  Panting, Imp said, “Couldn’t get him, but I figured she’s bound to be on our side, right?”

  I only nodded. There were other things to focus on, like the ones that had been torturing her.

  In the stairwell at the far end of the hallway, the one that mirrored our escape route, the main group, with the beautiful man, the spiky boy and a badly injured Gully were making their way down the stairs.

  I was ready. I already had thread attached to a rivet in the ceiling, thread attached to the knife I’d dropped to the floor below. It swung into the stairwell, an easy, casual swing.

  The disintegration effect carved into the people at the front of the group, into heads, shoulders, necks, and body parts unique to case fifty-threes.

  I used the swarm to control the swing, to swing it into the crowd that was hurrying down the stairs.

  More struck. Devastation, people falling over each other as they collapsed on the stairs.

  Someone, no doubt someone with a sensory power, reached for the knife, tried to grab it.

  I cut the thread with the mandibles of my bugs. It plunged down into the group, paused as the handle came to rest on writhing bodies.

  Then slid off to one side as the blade continued to eat through everything near it.

  Again, it ate through the stairs, falling to a floor below. I did what I could to catch it, using my bugs to grab after the threads that still trailed behind it.

  We reached the stairwell, and faced the group within.

  They’d barely dented the reinforced metal doors, with their myriad powers.

  Cuff ignored them, charging forward, and hit the door with her fist.

  The crash was loud enough to stun me, and I was at the thick of the group, furthest from the door.

  She did more damage to the door than most of them had.

  The Custodian was right. We wouldn’t have been able to break through here in normal circumstances. We’d have been cornered, more than we were in the cell.

  The damage continued outside. The Custodian pursued the group in the stairwell, harassing, bludgeoning. She separated the crowd into groups and then bulled them back, driving them towards empty cells. I was drawing my bugs back to me in stages, concentrating them on a few people at a time, trying to track what she was doing.

  Yet even with that, I couldn’t follow it all. Flayed skin, people holding their hands against one eye, joints bent the wrong way, bleeding wounds.

  Nothing lethal. Only punishment.

  Lung, Cuff, Golem and Rachel dealt with the five threats here in the stairwell. Shadow Stalker made her appearance, and dealt with the sixth, jamming a tranquilizer bolt into his neck.

  Cuff hit the reinforced metal door again. It bulged as if she were ten times the size, hitting ten times as hard.

  She hit it a third time, a fourth…

  On the fifth impact, it gave way.

  We made our way down.

  “Further,” I said.

  “FYI,” Tattletale’s voice sounded, “Losing you as you get further down.”

  “We’ll be in touch,” I said.

  “Attack in Gimel went. Not good, not bad, but it went. Didn’t want to dis…, but now it’s… …Just wanted to let you know. Bracing ours… …r nex… he didn’t show at next location… trying… where he is… Wish us-”

  And then radio silence.

  I tested the comm. No luck.

  Two stairwells, mirroring, no doubt for the safety of having a backup. The other group had stalled where the knife had delayed them. We proceeded further.

  Past the fourth floor.

  We stopped, panting for breath.

  Another reinforced door, open.

  An expanse of flat, brushed steel behind it. A dead end.

  And sitting in front of that expanse of steel were Satyrical, Blowout, Floret and Leonid. Revel and Exalt were nowhere to be seen.

  “It seems we’re going to have ourselves a problem,” Satyrical said, looking down at his fingernails.

  “No offense,” I said, “But I think we’re a little stronger, in terms of raw firepower.”

  “You are.”

  “So unless you’ve replaced half of my team with sleeper agents…”

  He shook his head. “Only just became aware of you, honestly.”

  “…I’m not particularly threatened.”

  “No,” Satyr said, speaking slowly, as if he were picking his words. “It’s not us. It’s him.”

  Him?

  Oh. Him.

  “And the one with the answers is buried under a half-mile of solid steel,” he said. He bit at the corner of one fingernail, then buffed it on the leg of his costume. “Like I said. A problem.”

  29.06

  “Weaver,” Cuff said. Her voice was pitched low enough that Satyr wouldn’t hear.

  I turned my head her way to acknowledge her. Satyr seemed to be preoccupied, sitting on a stair, picking something out of a groove in his golden belt. Dried blood?

  “You’re doing that c
razy mastermind thing again,” Cuff said.

  “Which crazy mastermind thing?”

  “Where you talk to the other masterminds and one of you leaves something unsaid, and the other knows what that thing is without asking. Who’s here?”

  “Scion,” Satyr said.

  “You heard me?” Cuff asked. Then, after a pause, she asked, “Scion?”

  I spoke up, “Leonid’s powerset includes the ability to hear everything in a certain range. That means everything, regardless of intervening obstacles, interfering or distracting noises and volume.”

  “I can hear your heartbeats,” Leonid said. He was a lean, young twenty-something with long golden hair and a mask with a lion motif. His upper body was draped in a black, skintight, sleeveless, bodysuit, his legs in loose-fitting pants. Complex looking gauntlets and boots encased his extremities, each tipped with wicked, six-inch claws. Not quite what he’d worn when he was on the Vegas Protectorate team. His eyes roved from Cuff to Imp. “I can hear your heartbeat speed up when you look at particular people.”

  “Satyr can tell you he already tried the seduction angle with his copies,” I said.

  Leonid grinned behind his mask. “Satyr was doing it to distract you. I’m not like that. I’m one of the active guys. It’s like how a magician shows one hand, all action, style and flourish, to get your attention…”

  He gestured towards Satyr, “…and the other hand is busy with the trick. Hate to break it to you, but I’m genuine when I make a move.”

  “Yet you’re all man-whores at the end of the day,” Imp said.

  “Imp,” I spoke, my tone a warning.

  Leonid only smirked in reply. Floret, for her part, cleared her throat.

  “You’re from Vegas, right? Just because you dress like a woman doesn’t mean-”

  “Satyr,” I said, cutting her off. “You think Scion’s here. Is he down there with the Doctor?”

  “He entered through the same gateway we did,” Satyr said. “I imagine he’s somewhere upstairs. It was always one of Cauldron’s greatest concerns, that Scion would make his way here through one of their doorways.”

  “Why?”

  “Cauldron’s plan B, their plan C, even plans D, E, and F, if things had gone without a hitch, they would have been deployed from this facility. Perhaps there is one in a million chance one of the plans potentially works. If they don’t, then perhaps they buy the rest of us some time, and a third party figures out a solution. Or perhaps they get close, and Cauldron uses the time that remains to refine the approach and the idea.”

  “The prisoners, all of the people upstairs…” Cuff said, trailing off.

  “Plan B. Also plan D, if you count the more unnatural deviants,” Satyr said. “Except Scion is now here, and he’s here now. All of the plans will be forced into effect at once, rendered into little more than alphabet soup. To top it off, the architect of those plans is out of reach.”

  I looked at the solid metal wall. “Cuff?”

  Cuff focused on the metal barrier. “I can tell from here. It’s a lot of metal. I don’t know how they did it. It’s all one solid piece.”

  “They did it with powers,” Satyr said. “A column, with the panic room dead center. When they retreated inside, they pulled the switch, and the entire substructure dropped two thousand, five hundred feet below ground, putting the upper end of the column between us and them.”

  Floret shrugged. “We could handle a computer, a lock, even a vault, no sweat. But not this. The plan was to wait for the group on the other side of the facility to forge their way through the steel, or around the steel, but someone gave the Custodian a tinker-made super death knife, and well…”

  “That was me,” I said. “Nothing to do with the Custodian.”

  “Ah, well,” Satyr said. “Good and bad to any situation. We’ll be able to assert control over that group more easily, with their leadership dead. And there won’t be as great a chance that they take the good Doctor out before we can get a word in… but progress will be slower, and we don’t have much time to spare.”

  It was a relief, on one level, that he didn’t seem interested in making a fuss over it. He’d set Spur and Nix in the way, to keep people from interfering with his group’s infiltration, but he seemed fully capable of accepting that there was a snarl in his plan.

  I knew it was hypocritical, but a part of me was bothered by that. I didn’t want him to be able to take this in stride. I didn’t want a lack of communication, conflicting plans and inter-group issues to be the norm, when the stakes were this high. Satyr was the type that thrived because he anticipated such.

  Maybe I was too.

  Satyr looked at the wall to his left. “The remaining members of the Irregulars and their digging party have just arrived at the far end of this column. If we go up one floor, we can cross to the other staircase and make our way down to pay them a visit. Given that the group watching their rear is… compromised, I don’t think we’ll have any problems taking control of that situation.”

  “If we leave now and walk briskly, we’ll arrive in eight minutes,” Floret said.

  “My details person,” Satyr said, “Would you believe?”

  My tone was dry as I replied, “Somehow, I’m not surprised.”

  Details would be Floret’s thing. She didn’t look it, with bright pink hair, green roots, and a costume of metal ‘leaves’ that left little to the imagination. Her costume philosophy was the antithesis of my own. But Floret wasn’t a fighter, even less than I was. She could take a minute or two to create a ‘bud’. The bud would then unfold into a complex crystalline shape after a set time, or upon impact with a surface. They were limited in terms of their size, no more than a foot across, but they were rich in potential, with crude applications on the molecular scale. Typically stylized to look like flowers, the crystals could bond to surfaces, set touched things on fire, cancel out chemical reactions or just fuck with tinker devices.

  As a teenager, she’d had a career as a roving lockpick for villain heist teams, creating keys and fake keycards with cloned magnetic strips, to varying degrees of failure. It was only when she joined the Vegas team that she found others with the degree of forethought, planning and teamwork that could let her power truly shine.

  Her power only worked because of her secondary power, and her secondary power was the big reason she fit in so well with the Vegas team. An enhanced awareness and processing ability regarding fine detail. She picked up on the little things. All of the little things.

  Satyr leaned back, then rolled forwards, getting to his feet without using his hands. “I assume you’re coming.”

  “Yes,” I said. If only to make sure you don’t pull something. “More bodies against Scion.”

  “Bodies don’t matter,” Satyr said, as he led the way. “One, ten, a thousand, it doesn’t make a big difference.”

  Speaking of bodies… Where the hell is Scion? There wasn’t even any noise.

  Was Satyr fibbing?

  No. It didn’t jibe. Not with the aura of defeat, not with the circumstance, with what Tattletale had said… they were good at the con, but not that good.

  I changed subjects. “Can I ask where the heroes are? Revel, Exalt and Vantage?”

  “With Nix and Spur,” Satyr said. “Most likely disguised as a rock or a bulge in the cave wall. Blowout hit them with a full-on stunning presence. They should still be out.”

  “I see,” I said, trying not to reveal how surprised I was. We’d walked right by the captive heroes. That wasn’t the big issue. Blowout was. He wasn’t as stylish or attractive as the others, with a featureless mask that had a single ‘eye’ at the brow, his head shaved. His armor panels had lights that slowly rotated from one color to another, like a chintzy car stereo. Unassuming, when he wasn’t engaged in a fight. When he was, the lights would be flaring, muscles would be standing out, and there would be noise, shock and awe involved.

  Blowout wasn’t a tinker; he had telekinetically assisted stren
gth, which meant that when he was hoisting a car over his head, he was doing it with his mind more than with his arms. The strength and durability increased with the size of the audience and the reaction he got from them. His secondary power was the effect he had on his enemies, feeding on the same reactions that fueled his strength to new heights and leaving his targets stunned, reacting slower, taking longer to pick themselves up off the ground. On paper, he was the case-in-point of what Leonid had been talking about, the hand that distracts while the other hand sets up the trick.

  But, as Floret suggested, it was something of a thing for Vegas capes to have ‘secondary’ powers that were actually the real power, in practice. Or maybe it was that Satyr tended to encourage a focus in the secondary powers, or a development of those same abilities. There was nothing on record about a long-term use of Blowout’s power, like Satyr had described. It would be a card he’d kept up his sleeve when he wasn’t doing something behind the scenes with the Vegas capes.

  I was put in mind of a few of the records and events that hadn’t quite fit. They’d checked, retroactively, for drugs, and found none. They’d checked for any remainder of Floret’s creations, and again, they’d found nothing. But if it was Blowout… if he was the reason people had been left with amnesia, brain damage and even brain death, then that gave me a bunch of new reasons to worry about the Protectorate heroes we’d left behind.

  A reason to watch our backs. I just had to wrap my head around how he might have done this so discreetly, when his power required the obvious and blatant.

  Satyr’s duplicates, maybe? Did the copies count as a crowd?

  Something to keep in mind… and I had to inform my teammates without Leonid knowing.

  I glanced at the leader of the Vegas mercenaries, noting how quiet he was as he ascended the stairs. He didn’t seem worried about anything. Not us, not Scion, not the riot above. Was I like that, when I was in the zone? Almost wanting to push him outside of his comfort zone, I said, “I expected you to ask about your teammates.”

  “Spur and Nix? They’re capable enough. If you’ve done something horrific to them, then informing me won’t help us in the here and now. I’ll have my revenge at a later date, all the same.”