Trump Card (Worm AU) [Complete]

Trump Card

Part Thirty-One: Revenge, Interrupted



[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]



PRT Department 24
Washington DC
Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown

There was something wrong.

Rebecca couldn't quite put her finger on it, but somewhere during her day, she'd seen or heard something that was ever so slightly off. She tried to shrug off the sensation, as nothing seemed to be amiss, but it clung to her consciousness and insisted that all was not right. So she sat at her desk and began to go through her day, examining each incident in her flawless memory, seeking the disparate note in the orchestra.

It seemed the best idea to examine her interactions with the personnel on site first. Deputy Director West was the person who could do the most damage if he were somehow suborned, so she picked him first. One by one, she analysed every word and gesture that he had expressed in her presence. Nothing jumped out at her, so she turned to her memories of West's subordinates in the chain of command.

After fifteen minutes of that, she concluded that their behaviour was well within acceptable norms. The next person on her mental list was Kathryn Grant, West's executive assistant. While not in the chain of command, she held a certain amount of authority within the building. All of this authority, of course, devolved directly from West; she could create no new initiatives without explicit authorisation from her boss.

Rebecca flashed back to the first point during which she had encountered Ms Grant, in the elevator. They had ridden up several floors together. A few casual words had been exchanged, then West and Grant had gotten out on the same floor. As she reviewed her memories of the elevator ride, Rebecca's brows drew together. All of the Grant woman's words and mannerisms had been precisely in line with what Rebecca knew of her … but when she was actually responding to someone as opposed to making a comment of her own, her reaction time was a good tenth of a second slower than average. The delay would have been imperceptible to someone without Rebecca's ability to examine a scene minutely in her memory, but it was there. More to the point, it was consistently there, all the way through the encounter.

She picked up her phone. There was no proof that something was wrong, save her own observations, but she could still have the Grant woman picked up and placed in Master/Stranger isolation until Legend or Eidolon came in to find out what was really going on with her. Just as she hit the first digit, the alarms went off.

She entered the rest of the number as fast as she could. At the other end of the line, West didn't answer immediately. She waited as the sirens blared, trying to restrain her impatience. The plastic creaked in the grip of her hand. Her every instinct demanded that she get out there and find out what was going on now, but common sense restrained her. There were no shots, explosions or smell of smoke, so the emergency had to be more subtle than a straight-up attack on the building.

Finally, her call was answered. “West.”

“What's going on?” she demanded.

“Security breach in secure storage three,” he replied crisply.

Secure Storage SSB3, she knew, was where they kept Endbringer fragments. “Who's involved?” she asked, knowing what answer she would hear. She also knew the precautions that had been taken to ensure nobody could breach the integrity of that secure storage vault—or escape once they had.

“Kathryn Grant. My executive assistant.” His tone was pained. “I can honestly say I never suspected this for a moment.”

At least he was accepting it. “None of us did. Once we get her into Master/Stranger screening, we can find out the truth,” she assured him. “In the meantime, seeing as you've had the most contact with her today …”

He picked up on the hint immediately. “Of course,” he said, a defeated tone to his voice. “I'll hand off my duties and have myself placed in M/S as well. Who should I give them to?”

That was another facet of Master/Stranger screening. Those under investigation were of course required to hand off their duties, but they weren't allowed to choose who to pass them over to. “I'll handle the security breach. My executive assistant will take over your desk. Hang up the phone immediately and report to Master/Stranger screening without speaking to anyone outside that department.”

“Roger that, ma'am,” he replied heavily, and hung up.

Rebecca put her phone away, then stood up from her desk. She took three steps out of her office and turned to her executive assistant, a smoothly efficient young man called Roberts. “We have a situation,” she said crisply. “Report to Deputy Director West's office. You're running his desk for the moment. Redirect all my calls there. Handle all non-urgent matters and put a hold on everything you can.”

Turning on her heel, she left him already folding his laptop. There was no doubt in her mind that he would be set up in West's office within five minutes. Now, all she had to do was find out who was idiotic enough to try to steal Endbringer material from under her nose, and good enough to actually get into Secure Storage Three. A grim smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she walked. She was going to enjoy this interrogation.

<><>​

L33t
Pwnage Base Apartment

“One,” L33t heard over his headset. 3-D coordinates showed up on the screen in front of him. “Two. Three.” As the Kathryn-duplicate's voice spoke, two more sets of coordinates arrived. His fingers were already hitting the buttons on the remote, followed by the Execute key. If everything was working right, a section of the 'ceiling' of the pocket universe would be shifting to a different texture to allow a piece of Endbringer to fall into the bin left there for that purpose.

He repeated the procedure for the second set and was halfway through the third set when “Now!” resounded in his ears. Abandoning the third set of coordinates momentarily, he hit the override key and the come-home button, both added to the remote after they'd gotten back to Brockton Bay. This was supposed to allow a rather larger portal to drop the Kathryn-duplicate into the base on to a large inflatable mattress. He still couldn't believe how much Über had bitched about not having the same courtesy extended to him, when they'd had to pull him out of Grant's house unexpectedly.

As soon as he had the portal closed, he went back to the coordinates. Hopefully, they hadn't pulled the samples into deeper storage. Entering the third set, he hit the Execute key, then wiped the coordinates from the screen.

As he pulled off the headset and hit the button to power down the computer—no sense in taking chances—Über looked over at him. “Well, how'd it go?”

“Let you know in a sec.” L33t stood up and pocketed the remote. He could've done all this from inside the base, but it was nice to be able to look out the window once in a while. Though they did have their bug-out procedure set up so they could be inside and buttoned up tight in thirty seconds.

They'd be a very frantic thirty seconds, but drills (suggested by Hax and seconded by Über) had shown it could be done.

“I'm coming too,” Über said, turning off the TV. “I wanna see what Endbr—”

“Don't say the word!” hissed L33t urgently, and Über shut up immediately.

Perhaps he was being paranoid, perhaps not. But while a careless utterance of that particular word outside of a secure location (the pocket universe which now made up their base was the only place he considered to be secure) might not be overheard and reported to the authorities, he didn't want to take chances. Especially since, if all had gone well, they now had in the region of forty pounds of stolen Endbringer material on their hands.

That was the difference between this heist and (nearly) every other one they'd managed to pull off. Cash, jewellery, paintings; that was everyday stuff. Nobody really cared about it, apart from the actual monetary value. But this … this was unprecedented. Part of him wanted to shout their triumph from the rooftops, but the more sensible part knew it was best to keep all this on the down-low. Everyone from the Triumvirate down were going to be looking hard for whoever had just ripped the PRT off, and he didn't think Birdcaging would be off the table. Even if Alexandria had put the word out to keep 'hands-off' on Taylor Hebert and Hax. They'd just made her look stupid, and nobody liked to look stupid.

The portal into the base was open all the time—they needed some way to run cables in—so he stepped through, with Über at his heels. “Check the bins,” he said as he peeled off to check on the Kathryn duplicate.

She was sitting up on the air mattress when he got to her. Despite the fact that she wasn't under outside control, she gave him a disconcertingly intelligent look. “Hello,” she said.

“Hey,” he replied, offering his hand to her. “Let's get you outside.” That would allow Taylor to take control of the animatronic puppet once more and let them know where to pick her up from.

“All right,” she said, grasping his hand and pulling herself to her feet. When he headed back toward the portal, she followed him.

“Woo hoo!” whooped Über from across the base. “All three! Fourteen pounds, thirteen point five and fifteen! Hax is a frickin' marvel!”

“Yeah, just don't forget that we've just managed to put egg on the faces of some really high-end people,” L33t said. “This is not something we're gonna be publicising.” He pulled the remote from his pocket. “Which reminds me. You need to go get the control strip. Chances are they made her before I pulled her through, so they'll be kicking down her door in ten minutes or less. We don't want them analysing that strip.” And of course, they couldn't build in a self-destruct for something that was going to be stuck to the back of the neck of an innocent woman.

“Gotcha.” Über headed for the section of the wall they generally used for exterior portals while L33t entered the coordinates for Kathryn Grant's house. When the shimmering pattern shifted to become a portal, he stepped through. L33t waited until he returned, then hit the button to return the shimmering grey portal to being a shimmering grey wall. Forestalling L33t's questions, Über waved the silvery strip. “All good.”

“Awesome. Leave it in Hax's workspace so she can destroy it.” L33t didn't think they'd need to use something like this again, but there was always the off-chance. If Hax destroyed something, it could be rebuilt, but the same couldn't be said for him. Or at least, that was the way it had always been.

He turned to the K-dup, who'd been standing there, patiently waiting for him. “Come on.” They stepped out into the living room of the apartment, and L33t turned to face the duplicate. “Hax, you there?”

The change that came over the animatronic body was subtle, but by the time it ended, L33t had no doubt he was talking to Taylor Hebert and not Kathryn Grant. “Hey,” she said. “How'd it go?” It still sounded weird to have Kathryn's voice speaking Taylor's words, though.

“No complications on our end,” L33t hastened to tell her. “All three samples in the bins. We just got the strip back, too. So, you want us to come pick you up?”

“Ah … that might be a problem,” she said awkwardly. “You know how I thought it was kind of ridiculous that Alibi got kidnapped twice in a row?”

L33t didn't want to come to the conclusion that her words offered, but it was inescapable. “You're shitting me. You've been kidnapped? Again?”

“Well, not 'again', technically speaking,” she said defensively. “It's the Empire, this time. They're trying to draw in Hax.”

“Shit, that's not a good thing,” he said urgently.

“What's not a good thing?” asked Über as he emerged from the portal.

“Hax's been kidnapped,” L33t explained. “By the Empire this time.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake!” snapped Über. “Again?”

“That's what I said!”

“It's not 'again' if I've never been kidnapped before,” Taylor said through the K-dup. She sounded irritated. “Anyway, they're going full court press on this one. According to Victor, they're taking me to an abandoned warehouse with a electric fence all around it, and an electrified cage to hold me in one place. They're even bringing in a body double in a wig to be a decoy in a second cage, and there'll be a bag over my head.”

“Well, fuck.” Über didn't usually go for understatement; L33t figured he must be rattled. “We'll come get you, of course. Where are you?”

“Right now I'm in transit so I can't be sure,” she admitted. “But once you get Alibi up and running again, she'll be able to home in on me.”

L33t frowned. “Are we going to have time for that?” he asked.

“We're going to have to make the time,” the K-dup insisted. “You two on your own aren't going to be able to rescue me without finding me first.”

“So all I've got to do is swap out the mind gestalts?” L33t said. “Two, three minutes, tops, right?”

The K-dup shook her head. “No, you're gonna have to change out the bodies, too. Kathryn couldn't fit in the Hax armour if she tried.”

L33t held up his hands defensively. “Whoa, no. No way. I know how much you value your privacy. If I changed out your bodies, I'd have to look at some point. And then it would be totally fuckin' weird forever after.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake.” The K-dup sighed. “Alibi's still fully clothed. You're just going to have to move the head over to Alibi's body, then change out faces, reset the brain and restore from Alibi's gestalt unit. I'll walk you through the instructions. But we need Alibi in that damn suit.”

“Oh.” L33t felt foolish. “So I don't have to rebuild her like you did?”

The Kathryn duplicate had a good line in eye-rolling. “Well, duh. I wasn't going to put you through that.”

L33t nodded. “Coolness. So, what do I do first?”

“Well, first, you need to go into the base and get some stuff that we're going to need …”

<><>​

Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown

“All right, dissolve the foam.”

It had taken a little while to clear non-essential personnel from the building and lock it down, but Rebecca wasn't taking any chances. If the intruder was someone like Pretender, who could 'ride' people from point to point, she wanted everyone watching everyone else. But everything was in place now. She'd wanted to be on the spot when the foam dissolved to reveal the infiltrator, but the PRT commander had insisted that she was too important to put into harm's way. And so, she was sitting in an office, one floor up, with a bank of screens showing the CCTV views of the area, and a microphone to give orders. It wasn't perfect, but she'd managed with worse.

On the screen, a trooper aimed a long spray-nozzle at the mass of yellow containment foam. A fog billowed out, causing the foam to dissolve into slime that oozed toward the floor. It was going to take a little while, but Rebecca was a patient woman. The last thing she wanted was for Grant to slip away because they were too hasty in their actions.

The first person they came across was the guard. He was doing as he'd been trained, lying flat before the foam had a chance to solidify, thus maximising comfort. Once he was free, he scrambled to his feet and stepped out of the way. Another trooper with a smaller spray canister worked him over from head to foot, relieving him of the last remnants of the foam, before he was escorted to Master/Stranger holding. Like West, he would be thoroughly processed before being allowed back on duty. And if he was somehow now the new host to the Stranger, then they'd find that out as well.

Foot by foot, yard by yard, they cleared the foam from the vault. Rebecca found herself leaning toward the screen, eyes searching for any sign of Kathryn Grant.

Her phone rang. Irritably she picked it up, to find that Roberts was calling her. Without taking her eyes off the screen, she answered it. “What is it?” she asked testily.

“Ma'am, I just got a call on Deputy Director West's private line. The lady identified herself as Kathryn Grant and apologised for sleeping in. She said she was getting ready to come in as soon as possible.”

Rebecca froze. “What's the status of the team that was dispatched to her home?”

“Thirty seconds out, ma'am,” he replied promptly. Of course he would've checked on that. “Orders?”

Her mind went into high gear, connecting the dots with lightning speed. There were two major possibilities here. One was that Kathryn Grant was a bald-faced infiltrator with a Mover rating, who was trying to cover her tracks with the story that she'd been sleeping in all this time. The second was that she'd been somehow cloned or otherwise copied and kept in a somnolent condition while the clone entered the building and carried out its mission.

“Put a slowdown on that,” she ordered. “Tell them to surround the house and apprehend her if she tries to leave, but not to effect a dynamic entry just yet. There's a chance she's innocent in all this.” Especially since her perfect memory had just thrown up another instance of someone who made use of a near-perfect body double to appear to be in two places at once. What does Taylor Hebert have to do with all this, if anything?

“Yes, ma'am,” he replied. She hung up the call, eyes still fixed on the screen. As she watched, the last of the foam was broken down into sludge, showing that the vault was otherwise empty. Another memory popped up, of Armsmaster's report from the aftermath of Lung's capture. Hax had been on a rooftop with several others, tentatively identified as Über and L33t, as well as the Undersiders. Though his visor had been mostly covered with containment foam, Armsmaster had said that he'd seen Hax disappear from sight into a doorway that wasn't there.

She's got access to some kind of portal tech, which means that they could've pulled whoever went in there out again, with nobody the wiser. “Get that vault checked out,” she ordered crisply. “I want to know what's missing, if anything. Also I want the recordings from all available cameras plus any and all sensors connected to that vault routed to this workstation stat.”

Someone had just played her for a fool, and she was pretty sure she knew who it was. Once she had any kind of proof, she was going to land on them with both feet. Staying hands-off with a cape suspected to be valuable in Endbringer fights was one thing, but that did not mean she should let them infiltrate the PRT with impunity. At the very least, Taylor Hebert required a reality check.

<><>​

Lt Daniel Edwards, PRT
Outside Kathryn Grant's Residence

“Hold … hold … she's coming out now.”

All the way over in the back of the APC, Edwards had been psyching himself up for whatever they might run into. A Master controlling the Deputy Director's executive assistant, a Stranger who might try to cut and run at the first opportunity … there were a dozen different possible scenarios. None of them had included a woman who simply walked out of her front door into the arms of two PRT troopers.

He watched her open her mouth to scream, then pause, obviously recognising his armour insignia. “”Lieutenant!” she called.

“Ear protection,” he subvocalised to the rest of the squad. “If I start acting hinky, foam me down.” He waited until he'd received a round of 'Roger' before he stepped forward. “Yes, Ms Grant?”

“Recognition code Delta Delta Myrddin Kyushu,” she said clearly.

At this point, he was almost certain it was the woman herself. An imposter, or a Mastered puppet, wouldn't know the codes. But there were still procedures to follow. “Papa Foxtrot Legend Ellisburg,” he responded. “We're going to need to search your home. Is there anyone in there?”

“Nobody that I know of,” she replied. Once again, he was impressed by her coolness under pressure. “Am I compromised?”

“Master/Stranger screening,” he advised her. “That's all I'm allowed to say.”

“Understood. I'm going to stop talking now.” Deliberately, she took her hand from her purse and dropped both it and her house keys on the doorstep. Turning her back to the troopers, she placed her hands up against the door and assumed the position.

Edwards keyed his radio. “Thompson, Fairleigh, frisk her and secure her. Don't take any chances but don't be too rough; she knows we're the good guys and she's going to cooperate. Leigh, Harris, Bannon, Stark, make sure the house is empty, then secure it for the tech boys. Don't touch anything.”

As his men jumped to obey, he kept a lookout all around, but he suspected that all the action here was done. But he had a duty to do his job properly, and that was what he was going to do.

<><>​

Taylor

The truck had made enough twists and turns that I wasn't really sure where I was. Not that I was really worried about that; over the course of the ride, while I chatted to L33t, I'd been steadily draining Victor's pool of accumulated skills. He had a lot of them, and his power helpfully informed me which ones had been learned naturally, which ones were entirely stolen, and which were a mix. The irony here was that anything I took from him that he hadn't spent the time to learn the hard way, he would lose for good. Ordinarily, stolen skills came back relatively quickly, between retraining and falling back on the memory of learning them the first time. But without those memories, Victor was crap out of luck. I tried not to snicker at the thought.

He may have caught me at it, but one of the first skills I'd eroded over the course of the truck ride was his ingrained paranoia and caution. That had taken a little time, but it had been worth it, because the second skill I'd drawn down was the ability to keep his mouth shut. Boasting was universal, after all. Everyone liked to make themselves look smarter and more important than they really were. It only took a few questions after that to learn that they were taking me to an abandoned warehouse, and to get details of the precautions they'd taken to ensure that I couldn't rescue myself quite as easily as I'd done with Coil.

The interior of the truck grew darker just before the truck pulled to a halt. “We're here,” Victor announced. “Out you get, girl.”

Obediently, I got out of the truck. As I'd suspected, we were now in a warehouse, with a big roller-door that was squeaking and squealing its way shut behind us. Outside, I caught a glimpse of a gate being closed outside the warehouse. That'll be the electric fence. Then my power grabbed my attention and tugged me around to look at the people now approaching us. Kaiser and Hookwolf were easy to identify as they were both covered in metal, as were Menja and Fenja because they were both about fifteen feet tall. The rest I tentatively identified as Stormtiger, Cricket, Othala and Alabaster.

Well, holy crap-balls. Victor had said there'd be capes here to give a warm welcome to Hax when she showed up to rescue me, so I'd figured I'd have a few powers to play with. He hadn't said anything about a buffet.

<><>​

Inside Pwnage Pocket Dimension Base
L33t

“Will you hurry up?” fretted Über. “They've had Taylor for ages now. God knows what they'll do to her if we don't rescue her.”

“It's been fifteen minutes,” L33t said absently. Carefully, he fitted the mechanical skull on to Alibi's body. “They've got Taylor as bait for Hax, not because they know she's Hax. She's more valuable to them unhurt.” The neck joint clicked into place, and indicator LEDs flared to life over the top of the cranium. Oh, good. That works.

For years, L33t had been resigned to having his tech fall apart at the worst possible moment. This reputation preceded him, perhaps a little unfairly. The very few Tinkers he'd met as a villain had been leery of letting him even handle their work, for fear that his bad luck would somehow infect them.

And then, Taylor joined the team and everything changed. Technically, she was using his power, but she still got him to assist with her Tinkering, and helped him with his work in return. His rate of catastrophic failure had dropped all the way to zero, and she was available to help fix any blunders he did make. Until now. Now, she needed him to put together Tinkertech she'd made, and he needed to get it right, first time.

Like Über, he was of course concerned over Taylor's well-being, but it would help neither of them if he screwed this up and they weren't able to come rescue her. So he was literally doing this by the numbers.

“Okay, next step.” He consulted the carefully written instructions that he'd had Taylor recite, then go over word for word until he'd been certain he knew what to do. “Clear brain memory cache of current imprint.” There was a port in the back of the head, with a recessed button on either side. Hax had told him it was possible to use Alibi's gestalt to overwrite Kathryn Grant's imprint, but that way led to the possibility of minor quirks cropping up later on. It was safer to do a complete wipe. Carefully, he plugged in the gestalt storage, then used his thumbs to press both recessed buttons at once. This wouldn't work at all if the storage wasn't plugged in, thankfully enough. The last thing they needed was to have Alibi fall over because she got tapped in the wrong place in the back of the head.

He watched as the lights on Alibi's skull blinked in sequence, starting at all green, and eventually going to all red. The artificial larynx spoke two words in a soft, impersonal voice: “Hello, world.”

“That's good, isn't it?” asked Über. “Is that good?”

“It's perfect.” L33t smiled. “That means it's ready for me to do the installation.” He re-checked the list of instructions, even though he was pretty sure he had them committed to memory by now. “Okay, this one might take a few minutes. Alibi's pretty damn complex.” Taking careful hold of the gestalt recording device, he pressed the button on the end. Green LEDs began to dance along the length of it. If he knew his binary, the code they were spelling out indicated that this would take some time.

Hold on, Taylor. We're going as fast as we can.

<><>​

Alexandria

Safely secluded away from prying eyes, it had only taken Rebecca about thirty seconds to go over the data at maximum playback speed. Then she sat back with her eyes closed, analysing it frame by frame. Not only had 'Kathryn Grant' (she was almost certain now that it had been a Hax-style body double in the elevator with her, though controlled by Hax rather than Grant) vanished from the vault just as the foam was coming down, but three drawers of Endbringer material had also been relieved of their contents at the same time. A total of 42.5165 pounds of the most expensively-won substance on the face of the Earth had gone missing, from the most secure holding the PRT could devise.

Not quite at the same time, she noted. Two drawers had been emptied while 'Kathryn Grant' had been scuffling with the guard—and, she noted, displaying CQC skills above the rating that Ms Grant had on her dossier. The floor sensors had ceased to register her weight just as the foam began to dispense from the nozzles. Visual imagery showed her falling toward the floor of the vault at that moment … or perhaps falling through it? If a portal opened up under her feet … The Endbringer material had vanished from the third drawer just after the foam had filled the vault, a good second after 'Kathryn Grant' fell through the portal, if that was what she'd done.

Opening her eyes, Rebecca studied the frozen image on the screen, of Kathryn Grant putting a trained PRT soldier on the floor with a picture-perfect throw. It had almost been the ideal heist. The perpetrator had gotten away with the goods, with no obvious way to track her down. Had they pulled it off so nobody even knew the Endbringer material was gone until someone looked, that would've been perfection. But it wasn't.

<><>​

An Extremely Anonymous Abandoned Warehouse in the Docks
Hookwolf

“Hey.”

Bradley looked around. It was the kid in the cage who’d spoken. The one Victor had snatched from the Boardwalk, Taylor something or other. He didn’t give half a shit about her, either which way. She was just a means to an end, and that end was all about showing Hax why mouthy bitches didn’t talk trash about the Empire.

Her voice was muffled because of the bag over her head. He wasn’t sure how she’d even known he was there, or why they hadn’t gagged her. But there was no real harm in seeing what she wanted. “What’s up, kid?”

“Do I really have to have my hands tied?” She didn’t sound petulant or whiny. She didn’t sound like a kid at all. What she sounded like was someone trying to hold on to their patience despite assholes pissing her off. Bradley knew that feeling. It made up most of his day.

“Sorry, kid,” he grunted. “If we did that, you might take the bag off. Don’t want Hax figuring out who she’s looking for straight off the bat, right?” It made sense to him, anyway.

“Oh, okay,” she said agreeably. “But you know I wouldn't do that anyway, right?”

“Well, no, but that's the orders Kaiser gave and I've gotta follow orders,” he pointed out. “Soon as we've got Hax locked down, we'll untie you and let you go.”

“So you're not going to hurt me?” She sounded hopeful.

“'Course not,” he scoffed. “You're just a little girl. It's not like you're a danger to the Empire or anything.” The whole idea was ridiculous.

“And what about Hax?” she asked. “Does she get to walk away, too?”

“Fuck, no.” He cracked his knuckles. “We're gonna fuck her up good. Nobody fucks with the Empire like that and gets away with it.”

“Oh, okay. Well, thanks for talking to me.”

“No problem. Just hang tight. This'll all be over soon.” Sweet kid. Polite, too. Pity she had to be pulled into this shit. Turning, he went to walk away, and nearly tripped. “Christ!”

“Want to watch it,” she said helpfully. “The floor's rough around there.”

“Oh, right, thanks.” He headed off, hoping nobody had seen his near-pratfall. Nice kid. Maybe I should pass the word to try and recruit her.

<><>​

Alexandria

For most people, this would've been the end of the line as far as the investigation went. The thread, pulled free, led to no more data. But Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown wasn't most people. She was singular. She was unique.

Back in her office, leaving Roberts to run West's desk until he was cleared (which she was certain he would be, along with the real Kathryn Grant, and the guard that the fake Grant had floored) Rebecca booted up her computer and entered her security code.

She'd been over the sensor readings of the transmissions to and from the vault. These had been what tripped the security alert in the first place, but it seemed that all they had were sidebands. The vault was supposed to be shielded from most normal communication channels. Tinkertech, of course, sneered at 'normal'; for all she knew, the signal had utilised gravitic wave propagation or magnetic field interference. Whatever it was, the shielding had been almost but not quite good enough to block it, so the signal strength had been raised, thus generating the sidebands, which had in turn tripped the security sensors. Unfortunately, even the most careful scrutiny failed to pick up enough data from the sidebands to reconstitute the original transmissions, so she had to go with a brute force method. Brute force, as it happened, was something she was quite good at.

Hax, she knew, was Taylor Hebert. However, the girl had shown herself to be quite adept at distancing herself from her crimes. Her two compatriots, rather less so. Before the team of Über and L33t had become Pwnage, the not-so-dynamic duo had been captured on more than one occasion. As was the practice, their identities had not been made public, and of course they'd broken out of the minimum-security holding into which they'd been placed. As almost painfully stereotypical supervillains, they never hurt anyone badly. Their crimes were flashy, and usually ended with them either running away or being apprehended yet again. Paradoxically, this meant they'd never be in danger of being Birdcaged. They made supervillains seem funny and silly and almost safe, which was the view Cauldron wanted to promote. The last thing anyone in power wanted was a public backlash against villains in particular and capes in general.

Now, of course, they'd undergone a severe competence upgrade. It was taking some longer than others to understand the fact that Pwnage was a force to be reckoned with, but Rebecca had seen that from the start. Of course, the Triumvirate were also a force to be reckoned with, and it was about time Taylor Hebert recognised that fact.

With her clearance, Rebecca had no problem accessing the files belonging to Über and L33t; she'd set the rules in place herself, after all. While she'd never actually had a good reason to view their mugshots before now, this was as good a time as any. Taylor Hebert's face, of course, she knew.

From there, she logged out of the PRT database and began a search of an entirely different type. Once Lung had been captured, the location of their hideout had been blown, so they'd need a new base of operations. It was possible that they'd simply taken over another abandoned location, so she instituted a search for any alterations in the power drain across Brockton Bay's electricity grid, starting from two weeks ago. Nothing seemed to jump out at her, and the search was taking its own sweet time to gather all its data, so she moved to plan B.

Plan B involved hacking into every single security camera and ATM camera across the city. It was a staggering task; or at least, it would have been, if she didn't have access to the world's greatest hacker. Sending an email to Dragon resulted in, shortly after, tens of thousands of adult male facial images being dumped into her inbox.

It didn't take long for her to write a script that took each picture and flashed it up on the screen for a tenth of a second. If Über or L33t had passed by even one security camera in that time, she'd know about it. The more cameras they came into contact with, the tighter the circle she could draw around their location.

This sort of search, of course, was entirely unconstitutional and illegal in several ways. Not to mention the fact that it absolutely shattered the so-called 'unwritten rules' that were bandied about among the street-level capes. But with the fate of the world at stake, Rebecca had never worried about such trivial things as laws, much less agreements of convenience.

The script began its work, flashing a never-ending stream of images on her screen. On and on the progression of images went, hundreds and thousands of them.

There. Her finger stabbed out and paused the lineup. Scrolling back up, she selected the image of Über and put it aside. The next one was L33t, and then Über again. Then she had a rash of them.

By the time she finished, she had a whole series of hits based around a certain area. It wasn't conclusive data regarding an address, but she still had the power spikes to look into.

The map refreshed itself, and she did indeed pick up a mild power spike right in the middle of the area she'd located. But, interestingly enough, she also noticed that electricity use had jumped hard in one particular location in the Docks, just about the time when the heist was ongoing in the secure storage vault. Rebecca was not a person given to believe in coincidence. Her smile became something that a shark might wear while closing in on an unwary swimmer. So you've got an apartment and an offsite base. Clever. Well, you're not clever enough.

And that was when the Endbringer alarm went off.

<><>​

Über

Fully aware he was hovering like a mother hen, Über pulled himself away from L33t's side. It was nerve-wracking, being able to do nothing until Alibi was ready for action. They had no idea about where Taylor was, or how many capes they'd be facing, or anything, really. It would be inside a warehouse, there would be other capes there, and there'd be an electric fence outside. That was the sum total of his knowledge.

Seeking something, anything, to distract him, he wandered past the large monitor that served as a repeater screen for the main computer system in the apartment outside. Just as he did so, a window popped up, with a red flashing light on it, while a tone began to sound. This was unusual enough that he looked more closely. Fuuuuuuck.

“Bro!” he called out, sprinting for the entrance. “Get that shit sorted! We got trouble!”

<><>​

Taylor

Hm, maybe I overdid it a bit with Hookwolf. I'd been experimenting with drawing down the instinctive skills that everyone learns as they grow up. Balance was a very simple one, and Hookwolf's was now on par with that of a four year old. The draw-down wouldn't last long, because his memories of having learned how to walk without falling over would quickly fill in the gaps once he had a chance to practise again. But in the meantime, he would have a hard time walking and chewing gum. His fighting skills were now likewise woeful, and I'd been hammering on his ingrained habits of suspicion and paranoia, to the point that he was also as gullible as said four year old.

He wasn't my only victim. Victor had fallen prey to his own power, and nearly everything combat-related he'd once known was now something I knew. The funny thing was that he didn't think I knew any worthwhile skills, so he hadn't turned his power on me. In the meantime, between him and the other people I'd been drawing off, I now knew far too many ways to kill someone with my bare hands, and my sense of balance was amazing. I was also hyper-cautious and paranoid to a fault, but in this situation, such traits were actually a bonus. More to the point, I could choose not to use those skills if I wanted to.

Before Hookwolf got out of range, I retracted the razor-steel insectoid mandibles that I'd grown from my mouth to shred my gag, and made sure that the knives I'd generated were hidden up my sleeves. With those blades, I'd be able to murder almost anyone in the room in a spectacularly gory fashion—Victor, Hookwolf and Cricket had known a lot about knife fighting—and I had contingency plans for the ones who fitted in the 'almost' category. Not that I intended to get my hands bloody unless I had to, but I wanted to be able to free myself if necessary, and I couldn't bank on having Kaiser or Hookwolf nearby at the right moment. Although for me, 'nearby' covered quite an area.

Okay, if I've got my timing right, the guys should be bringing Alibi online any moment now.

And that was when the Endbringer sirens went off.

<><>​

Simurgh

The Third had targeted many people over the years, usually in order to spread chaos or to ensure that a particular event took place. Rarely had she gone after a specific person with the intent to kill. However, recently she'd noted a potential problem with one specific parahuman in Brockton Bay. Monitoring her activities became problematic, once the parahuman gained access to a time-distortion field and then a pocket universe.

But now the girl in question had access to something that could cause the Third and her brothers serious injury or even death, if she was not stopped. No scenario she could plan allowed either the First or the Second a guaranteed success, so it was up to her.

Arrowing down toward Brockton Bay, on a direct line with one particular teenage girl, the Simurgh had no intention of playing her usual cat and mouse games. While she wouldn't uncover her full potential—worthy opponents, after all, must appear beatable—she would bend all her efforts to one end.

The death of Taylor Hebert.



End of Part Thirty-One

 

Trump Card

Part Thirty-Two: All Cards on the Table


[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]


Alexandria

Even as Rebecca was reaching for her phone, it rang. She snatched it up and accepted the call in one quick movement. “Talk to me.”

“Ma'am, this is Peterson in Ops. We've just received word that the Simurgh is leaving orbit and descending toward the northeastern seaboard of the United States. Potential targets are Providence, Boston, Brockton Bay or Portland. New York might be the target, but that's unlikely. Right now, we're looking at Boston or Brockton Bay.”

“Understood.” She ended the call and hit the speed-dial for Roberts. This was no longer a leisurely game of cat and mouse. There was a double-headed choice to make here. Taylor Hebert had offered to step up if the Protectorate needed her help. While Endbringers had not been specifically mentioned during their brief conversation, she knew that the Hebert girl had understood the meaning from context, even if her father hadn't quite made that connection.

The problem was, had she known about the upcoming attack, and planned to use the forthcoming Endbringer truce to skate from any punishment arising from it? Or did she just trigger the Simurgh's attack? Was it coming down on Brockton Bay to pre-empt whatever she had in mind with the Endbringer material?

Lightning-fast, her mind sorted through the scraps of information and hints of body language gleaned from her sole encounter with the girl, and came down solidly in favour of the latter explanation. If that was the case, if Taylor Hebert was doing something the Simurgh wanted to stop her from doing, it was Rebecca's job to help her achieve it at all costs. She just needed to get there before the Endbringer did.

“Yes, ma'am?”

“Listen carefully,” she said crisply. “I’m going to be away from my desk. Hold all calls of a non-urgent nature until further notice.”

Barely waiting for Roberts’ assent, she sent a text to her body double—there’s irony for you—to alert the woman for action. Diverting her calls to the body double’s phone only took a moment, then she put the phone down and took a deep breath.

“Doorway.”

<><>​

Taylor

It took me all of two seconds to come to the conclusion that the Endbringer sirens were directly connected to my special project. It was intended to kill Endbringers, after all. With an effort, I stopped myself from thinking any more deeply about the project; there was no sense in giving the opposition any more ammunition than they already had.

Which one’s coming after me? That was the next question, and I had the sinking feeling that I already knew. There were no ongoing earth tremors that I could feel through the concrete slab I was sitting on, and I couldn’t hear rain hitting the roof. Which left the scariest one of all, and the one I felt least adequate to take on, even encased in my armour. Notably, I wasn’t encased in my armour right at that second.

My situation was dire; I was vulnerable, bound, imprisoned. It wouldn’t have mattered if the capes around me had been inclined to rally to my defence. I very much doubted that they were capable of actually protecting me, even if I hadn’t just spent the last twenty minutes eroding their combat skills and critical perceptions.

On the upside, this offered a half-assed ray of hope; if the Simurgh had decided to come down and attack me, it meant my project was actually capable of producing a viable result. On the downside, it looked as though the Simurgh was en route to kill me because my project was about to bear fruit. Worse; she might sing me into insanity and leave me to create weapons to ravage mankind. At that last thought, everything I had that could clench … clenched.

Come on … come on …

But Alibi wasn’t online yet. Without her running the suit, I couldn’t get a location for where I was. Specifically, I couldn’t get a location on the other girl. I didn’t know who she was, but she needed rescuing perhaps a little more than I did.

“Uh, guys?” I raised my voice slightly. “Can we maybe put a pin in this and get back to it after the Endbringer thing’s over? Endbringer Truce and all?”

There was actually a general murmur of half-hearted agreement from most of the Empire capes; put into words, it would’ve gone something like uh, boss, she’s kinda got a point, maybe? Of course, given that they were saying this to Kaiser, it was somewhat more wishy-washy than a king-sized laundromat. As such, he had no difficulty ignoring it.

“We will do no such thing,” he declared. “To walk away now would alert Hax to our overall strategy, for no gain to ourselves. Once we’ve brought her down, we’ll join the fight. But until then, we have our own business to attend to.”

I was pretty sure this skirted the boundaries of the Truce kind of close. Like, tromped all over them. But Kaiser was the type who ignored any rules but those he set himself, and even then he could change them on a minute-by-minute basis. He also had a lot of business skills, which I ignored for the moment. For all I cared, he could be Nazi Accountant of the Year. Right at that moment, I was more concerned about (and responsible for) the fact that he had the tactical and strategic acumen of a stunned sloth. Which was why he hadn’t yet twigged to the fact that I was speaking when I really should have been gagged.

That was when Alibi stepped out through the portal into the apartment and reconnected with me. I felt her pseudo-consciousness merge into mine, and suddenly I was looking out of two sets of eyes. The plans I’d been mulling over in the back of my head crystallised and she/I started barking orders. Gratifyingly, Über and L33t didn’t even argue; they just jumped to it. Then I gave Alibi orders of my own, which I knew she could obey. Turning, she dashed back into the pocket dimension, cutting her off from my awareness once more.

I didn’t relax; the cavalry might be on the way, but they weren’t here yet.

<><>​

Alexandria

Rebecca emerged from the Doorway above Brockton Bay and turned in midair, seeking her bearings. To the south and east, she saw one of the more horrifying sights it was possible to view in the modern world; a long cone of fire, arcing down into the atmosphere from over the horizon and tipped by a glowing white dot. Normally, the Simurgh re-entered atmosphere in an almost leisurely fashion, drawing out the terror to come. Now she was on a mission, pushing herself through the ever-thickening air so fast that the friction was turning the atmosphere around her to plasma. Rebecca estimated that she would be over her target in five minutes or less, despite having more than a thousand miles to go. That’s Mach 15, at a minimum. I didn’t know she could go that fast.

Legend and Eidolon emerged from identical Doorways, less than ten yards away. Turning, Legend spotted the incoming Simurgh. “Damn,” he whispered. “She’s out for blood.”

“I need you two to hold her off,” ordered Alexandria. “The cavalry’s on the way, but right now you’re it.”

“What are you going to be doing?” asked Eidolon, though he was already flickering through a series of power choices.

Alexandria’s voice was crisp. “You’ve heard of Hax? She’s down there somewhere. Five weeks ago, she hinted to me that she was working on something; my inference was that it was for combating Endbringers. Seventeen minutes ago, she stole forty-two pounds of Endbringer material from supermax storage, directly under the DC office. Two minutes ago, the Simurgh started a run toward Brockton Bay. Connect the dots.”

Legend’s eyebrows rose toward his hairline. “Holy shit. She finished it, and the Simurgh’s determined not to let her keep it.” Rebecca could see in his eyes that he wanted to ask about how a teenage girl had managed to pull off a robbery right under her nose, but he was restraining himself. Which was a good thing; questions like that could wait till afterward.

She nodded in response to the comment he had made. “That’s my estimation, too. Best case, I want to save it and the girl who built it. Worst case, I want to keep it and her out of the Simurgh’s hands, by any means necessary. We all know how good she is at weaponising tinkertech. Not to mention people.” She turned away, preparing to dive toward the city below.

“What the hell sort of weapon uses Endbringer material?” called out Eidolon from behind her.

“I’ll be sure to ask!” she shouted back, then accelerated downward.

Toward, as it turned out, entirely the wrong target. For a given definition of ‘wrong’.

<><>​

Taylor

While Alibi was active, I always knew exactly where she was in relation to me. It was easy enough to reverse that, and locate myself in relation to her, but more in a ‘this distance at this angle’ situation than a ‘input these coordinates’ one. Thus, she could use the suit to teleport to me, but we couldn’t open portals from the base into the warehouse until we had a better source of targeting data. Conveniently enough, the suit itself would be a better source of targeting data. With that in mind, I’d given her the order to suit up and teleport to a specific point in relation to me.

In the meantime, with the material I’d just stolen, Über had activated my project for its first production run. Twelve units, loaded for Simurgh. I wished I could be there myself for the occasion, but I’d done enough dry runs that I knew the process itself was sound. And I really, really wanted the final product to be up and running by the time it came to face the incoming Endbringer.

At the same time, L33t was taking on a different task. The air mattress was already set up, so he was prepping a device we’d used before and I’d rebuilt; specifically, the Cortana spy-eye from the casino job. The prep job he was doing involved swapping out one holo-image for another. While normally we wouldn’t have risked that—the spy-eye had been patterned after the recording sphere everyone else called the Snitch—we didn’t have a real choice in the matter. Also, his powers had been behaving themselves recently, so we had to take a chance. When Alibi teleported through to where I was being kept, the spy-eye would provide a useful decoy.

Of the three tasks, Alibi had it the easiest. Using my voice, she was able to trigger the code phrase ‘Armsmaster is a dick’ and let the suit do the rest. The teleport function of the suit didn’t work from within the pocket universe—something to do with a non-compatible frame of reference, as far as I could tell—but all she had to do was step out through the portal and home in on me.

But when I reconnected with her, the first thing she/I saw was … Alexandria. Also, a hole where a window had once been. The Triumvirate hero straightened up from examining the bundle of cords going into the open portal and turned to Alibi.

“Miss Hebert,” she said, taking hold of the suit by its upper arm. “You’re in great danger. The Simurgh is less than four minutes out. I need to take you to safety. Where’s your tinkertech project? In there?” She indicated the shimmering grey portal behind Alibi.

“I’m not the one you want,” I said through Alibi. You idiot, you’ve just captured the stunt double. “But I’ll take you where she is. Buckle your seatbelt.” Not giving Alexandria time to argue—because of course she was going to argue—she/I tossed the spy-eye back through the portal and triggered the teleport.

I would’ve given a great deal of money—after all, I had a great deal of money—to see the faces of the Empire capes when they realised who’d just teleported into their midst. But I was too busy grabbing the brand-new light-spot and making use of it. The zip-ties on my wrists popped free, even as Alibi smacked out Victor, Othala and Cricket in quick succession. Knowing that a punch is coming doesn’t help if the training to avoid it is mysteriously absent.

I grabbed hold of the cage bars and yanked; electricity popped, and I felt a faint tingle, but Alexandria could weather a lightning strike. This was nothing, compared to that. Stepping away from the ruins of my previous prison, I pulled the bag off my head.

Kaiser was down, and in my range. Alexandria was moving toward Fenja and Menja, who were growing to near their maximum heights—exactly what I didn’t want—while holding their weapons in a vaguely defensive stance. Alibi was facing off against Hookwolf, Alabaster and Stormtiger; even lacking most of their combat training, their powers made them tough opponents.

First, I tapped into Stormtiger’s abilities and sent an explosive air-bolt against Hookwolf, then I swapped to Kaiser and formed a flexible metal net attached to the ceiling. The bolt smashed into the metal-clad cape and he stared around wildly to see who’d attacked him. Stormtiger, with his awareness of the air, was already looking at me. “Holy shit!” he yelled, pointing. “She’s—!”

That was when I dropped the net over all three of Alibi’s opponents, using Stormtiger’s power to guide it down and mask it from the air-manipulator’s senses. They yelled and tore at the net, but that meant they were all standing still in the same place just for a few seconds, which was plenty long enough for me. By the time they got through the net, they were locked in a steel box. With air-holes; I wanted them to live to face trial. Given the respite, Alibi took out the remote and used it to drop the other hostage into the base with a well-placed portal. Kaiser and Victor followed, as soon as the box was complete.

Alexandria had the giantess twins on the back foot, but she had trouble landing a solid blow without bringing the whole building down on our heads. I helped her out by using Stormtiger’s air-manipulation to deprive her opponents of air. It turned out that being twenty feet tall required a lot more oxygen than being six feet tall. When they started to stagger, I switched to Cricket’s power and followed up with a blast of concentrated high-pitched sound to the inner ears; they both folded within seconds.

As they shrank in size, I borrowed Alexandria’s power to shove everyone into the same rough area. “How long?” I called to the Triumvirate cape.

She shook her head. “Legend and Eidolon are supposed to be holding her off—”

With a great rending sound, the roof of the warehouse came away. Still glowing with the heat of re-entry, looking a little ragged around the edges, the Simurgh hovered there.

It didn’t matter that she never showed expression; even without it, she looked pissed.

Alibi hit the remote; the area of floor under the defeated villains turned to shimmering grey and they fell through. I grabbed Alibi and dived toward it myself, while Alexandria rocketed upward at the oncoming threat. As we fell toward the portal, I could feel the Simurgh’s telekinesis trying to pull me back, but I had Alexandria’s strength and flight at my disposal.

There was a tremendous impact behind me. I literally felt the heat as the Simurgh pushed Alexandria backward, down toward me. Then Alibi and I hit the portal and went through, losing my link to Alexandria as I did so. I let Alibi go; she could take care of herself. But then, halfway to the floor, just as I was planning out my tumble-and-roll, I felt the hand close over my ankle.

The heat seared through my jeans in an instant, and I screamed at the sudden agony. Dangling by one leg, I looked up to see half the Simurgh’s face, along with three of her wings and one arm. I also smelled my flesh smoking and burning from the heat of her hand.

The texture of the ceiling changed back to normal; I fell to the ground, along with the bits of the Simurgh that had been protruding through the portal. There was too much agony coursing through my veins to even think about landing properly, but Alibi was there to catch me. She lowered me gently to the floor, then kicked the bit of the Simurgh that had been holding me off into the corner.

Things got a bit fuzzy there, as I tried not to pass out from the sheer blinding agony that consumed my leg. Through the haze, while things went on around me, I tried to recall the techniques I’d learned for pushing away pain, and applied them. Bit by bit, I got it under control.

When I opened my eyes, Über was applying a bandage to my leg. I could look at it now as if it wasn’t part of me, as if the torturous burning was happening to someone else. The pain wasn’t as bad as it had been, which suggested either impressive levels of painkillers or that she’d seared straight through the nerves, destroying them on the way.

“How bad is it?” I asked, surprised at the rawness of my throat. I hadn’t realised I’d been screaming that much.

“In here or out there?” he asked, carefully wrapping the last of the bandage around my ankle.

“Both. Either.” I knew there was bad news waiting in the wings, but there was no sense in ignoring it.

“Well, we’ve got the bad guys all secured.” He tied off the bandage and dusted his hands briskly. “Cricket and Victor woke up and got frisky, so L33t had to subdue them.” Which was a concept I never thought I’d have to try to imagine. “As soon as you landed, we did an emergency bug-out from the apartment, so we’re currently running on internal power.” He pointed at me. “As for you, your leg is severely burned. If you don’t get it to a good hospital, or to Panacea, in the next few days, you’ll probably lose everything below the calf.” He paused, thinking. “And that’s it for in here.”

“And out there?” I prompted. “How long’s it been?”

“Fifteen minutes.” His lips tightened. “She’s been singing. The capes are trickling in, but this attack happened at zero notice. Worse, every time we open a portal and stick a probe out, she tries to get in. I sent the spy-eye out for a look, and she obliterated it.”

Shit. Dad. I felt sick to my stomach. The longer we sat tight in our little bunker, the longer her scream had to be affecting everyone in Brockton Bay.

“What happens if we open two portals?” I knew they had to have tried this.

“She heads for the nearest one,” he reported. “If we shut that one off, she appears at the other one more or less instantly.”

“Teleporting,” I said.

“Teleporting,” he agreed. “And the worst bit? If she gets even a finger in through a portal, we start hearing her scream in here.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “On the upside, we now have three of her fingers in storage, as well as the arm and stuff. We’ve got ammunition for days.”

All that aside, this posed a definite problem. I had a teleport jammer, but it was the alternate mode for my suit’s teleport capability. Thanks to Lung, it was thoroughly integrated into the suit, to the point that I had no idea how long it would take to extract and rebuild. If it even could be rebuilt outside the suit now. And then there was the other problem.

“If L33t and I made another jammer, she’d just destroy it, wouldn’t she?” I was gloomily sure of the answer.

“It’s what I’d do,” he agreed. “Nullifying teleportation doesn’t do anything to make it immune to brute force.”

I took a deep breath and nodded as the plan came together in my head. “All right, then. We don’t use it to stop her. We use it to slow her down.”

He tilted his head. “I’ve seen that face before. That’s the face that says something terrifying’s about to happen.”

“Or something awesome,” L33t put in, leaning around the cubicle wall. “Please tell me you’ve got something in mind. Because I don’t want to spend my last hours sharing oxygen with the Empire Eighty-Eight.”

I sat up in bed and cracked my knuckles. “Yeah, I’ve got a plan. I’m gonna go out there and face that bitch down.”

L33t’s eyes widened, but Über held up his hand. “Not a great idea,” the big guy cautioned me. “You’re still weak from your injury. By the time you’re outside, she’ll be on you.”

I nodded. “That’s the plan.” Reaching out, I flicked my light-spot from one recipient to the next, until I reached Alabaster. Four seconds passed … eight and a half … thirteen … seventeen … finally, his power kicked in, and I let out a gasp of relief as the pain faded.

“What the hell was that?” asked Über. “You went really white there for a bit.”

“Turns out that Alabaster’s power can be coaxed into resetting to an earlier point,” I said absently as I started unwrapping the bandage. “I just had to push the reset point far enough back to do me any good.” As the bandage came away, my leg proved to be clean and undamaged.

“Hax.” L33t shook his head as I climbed off the inflatable mattress. “Pure hax. What’s your next trick gonna be?”

“Like I said, go out there and face that bitch down.” I rubbed my hands together. “But first … prep. All the prep.”

<><>​

Ten Minutes Later

Alexandria

The only thing that ensured this fight was not a total debacle was the way the Simurgh kept breaking off to go after the shimmering grey portals hanging in midair. Rebecca knew what they were, but she wished Hax and her compatriots would either do something useful or stay out of the way. She’d never known the Simurgh to be so single-minded about killing one particular person before, which only underlined the importance of Taylor Hebert’s work.

As it was, New Wave was assisting as best they could (which amounted to holding back and sniping from a distance, after Glory Girl was carried off unconscious), while Faultline’s Crew did search and rescue below. The local Protectorate didn’t have any flyers; the Wards did, but they hadn’t yet been authorised to join in on the battle. Besides, one of them was a tinker, who was the very last person anyone wanted in close proximity to the Simurgh. From Rebecca’s personal recollection, the other one was a pseudo-Brute, nowhere near strong enough to do anything to an Endbringer.

She lanced in, jinked once around a blocking wing, and landed a punch on the Simurgh’s midsection. Many, many battles had taught her that trying for headshots or other normally-debilitating attacks just didn’t work with Endbringers. Overwhelming damage was the only way to drive them off. Her opponent tried to push her sideways into one of Legend’s lasers, but the blast merely dodged around her and struck the ghost-pale Endbringer all the same. Eidolon’s attack arrived a moment later; a series of blasts based on gravity, if she was any judge. They staggered the Simurgh but did no more than that.

And then the blank-eyed woman turned her head to stare at a spot on the street. Rebecca’s heart sank as she saw the group of people who had tumbled out of a portal. They were costumed and carried various weapons, but there was no way they would be able to stand up to an Endbringer. Her perfect memory brought up the images, matching them to the Empire Eighty-Eight, plus a teenage girl and a couple of mooks wearing crude cloth masks. These were the people she’d been fighting just before the Simurgh arrived. Why is she releasing them now? Endbringer Truce? If that was the case, why not let them off much farther away from the battle?

Even as this thought whipped fleetingly through her head, the Simurgh turned again. Attacks from both Legend and Eidolon smashed into the Endbringer during her moment of distraction, but barely seemed to faze her. Rebecca turned to see what had gotten the creature’s attention this time, and her heart sank all the way to her boots. There stood Taylor Hebert, carrying an odd-looking rifle. Beside her was the Hax armour, the external holocloak showing the image of Master Chief, hefting a much larger firearm. A thick cable led from the second weapon back through the portal behind them.

She’s dead. There’s nothing I can do about it. Already during this battle, she’d seen the Simurgh teleport to a new portal and attempt to tear it open with main strength. Each time, she’d lost fingers, but that hadn’t stopped her any more than losing one arm and half her head had stopped her. Once the Endbringer got her hand and wings on Taylor Hebert, it would all be over.

But the Endbringer didn’t teleport. She had every reason to do so, but … didn’t. After only half a second or so of hesitation, she brushed Rebecca aside and accelerated toward Taylor Hebert. But that gave the armoured figure time to raise the monstrous rifle and fire. With a deep BZORCH sound, an actinic violet beam leaped out and impacted the Simurgh.

For a weapon as impressively scaled as the energy rifle was, it didn’t seem to pack much of a punch, for all that the violet beam was so bright that it was painful for her to look at. The Simurgh kept coming, though it seemed that she slowed a little. And then, before Rebecca’s disbelieving eyes, she came to a complete halt in midair, just floating there. For one long painful moment, Rebecca allowed herself to hope. Then, with a sharp crack, the gun itself exploded, sending shrapnel flying in all directions.

With the cessation of the beam, Rebecca would’ve expected the Simurgh to capitalise on the opening. But instead, she seemed … dizzy, or even disoriented. Holy shit, that gun actually affected her? Unfortunately, it seemed to be a Pyrrhic victory; the gun was gone, and the Endbringer was recovering from its effects. But all was not done yet.

Seemingly untroubled by the fact that the equivalent of a hand-grenade had gone off in their faces, Taylor and the armoured figure were each raising one of the smaller odd-looking rifles. As were, as Rebecca belatedly realised, nearly all of the Empire Eighty-Eight. They hadn’t been running away. They’d been forming a firing line.

Rebecca couldn’t be sure who shot first, but it turned into a firestorm in less than a second. Next to the big gun, the zzkrak of the rifles sounded positively tinny, but the odd glittering white laser-like bursts passed through the rubble orbiting the Simurgh without leaving a mark. Not so the Simurgh; any of the beams striking the Endbringer bored out an inch-wide hole, all the way through.

By the time the Endbringer began to recover from the effect of the violet beam, the impromptu firing squad was well underway. While the majority of the people doing the shooting were mediocre at best in their skill levels, at least three were world-class. These included one of the Empire mooks, Taylor Hebert, and whoever was piloting the armour. Rebecca was starting to get a suspicion about that, but shelved it for later.

In the second or so it took the Simurgh to shake off the effect of the beam, she demonstrated all too vividly the problem with being a sitting duck. Had she been moving, four out of five shots would’ve missed. As it was, all but a few hit her, putting more holes in the luckless Endbringer than the most cartoonish block of Swiss cheese.

Even with that, while they were still firing, she recovered enough to lunge forward once more, her sole remaining hand (and few remaining fingers) reaching out for Taylor Hebert. Darting forward, Rebecca braved the fire, gambling that it was tuned specifically for Endbringer matter. The shots tingled unpleasantly as they passed through her, but did nothing more. Grabbing the creature’s sole remaining arm and one wing, she tried to hold the Simurgh back. With a rending crack, both limbs broke free, and the Endbringer continued forward.

But the delay had been just long enough. The last volley of shots hit the Simurgh, none of them in what Rebecca would’ve called a vital area (given that all of those had already been thoroughly honeycombed, she wasn’t surprised) but one or more must have told, because the Endbringer just … stopped. A couple of seconds later, the winged woman crashed to the ground a few yards away from Taylor Hebert, shattering into several pieces as she did so. There was no twitching, no last firing of nerves. Endbringers, Rebecca was certain, had no nerves. Slowly, she descended toward where the remains of the Simurgh lay, dropping the wing and arm on top of the heap. The weird ichor that passed for blood was leaking out of the silvery flesh, while feathers ruffled in the breeze.

Landing, she walked toward Taylor Hebert, who came to meet her; still carrying the rifle. The armoured suit matched the girl pace for pace, the holocloak gone for the moment. Neither of them seemed to have been harmed by the explosion of the rifle, except for a little soot here and there.

“I have so many questions.” Rebecca pointed at the Simurgh. “But first: how?”

Taylor tossed her the rifle she was holding. “Endbringer rifle. You’re welcome.”

Reflexively, Rebecca caught it. “ … Endbringer rifle?” She blinked twice, assimilating the knowledge. This is what the Endbringer material was for. She looked the weapon over. Most of it seemed to be straightforward, except for a dull crystal built into the top. “Is that the power source?”

“That’s the storage device,” Taylor corrected her. “I’ve got a machine that makes these, and charges the crystal with the right sort of energy. Bits of Simurgh for bitch-features here, bits of Leviathan for Leviathan, and so forth. I can build one pre-charged rifle per pound of matter, each with a ten-shot crystal. Unrechargeable, though. You wouldn’t believe how much easier it made construction.” She looked up. “Oh, hey, guys. Nice shooting.”

Rebecca looked around as the two cloth-masked mooks trotted up, with a teenage girl trailing behind them. Each of the men carried five more of the rifles over their shoulders. “You weren’t kidding about the gun exploding,” said the skinnier one.

Rebecca frowned; she knew that voice.

“L33t?” she asked. “You two are Über and L33t?” Of all the people anywhere she was likely to encounter at the scene of the death of an Endbringer, those two were somewhere around the bottom of the list.

“No, we’re Simon and fucking Garfunkel.” The big guy with the resonant voice shook his head in disgust. “Of course we’re Über and L33t. Got any more stupid questions?”

Rebecca shook her head, then looked at the teenager behind them. “And you are?”

The girl was tall and skinny, rather like Taylor, but had short blonde hair rather than Taylor’s long black curly locks. She shuffled her feet on the ground, not wanting to meet the hero’s eyes. “The Empire, uh, offered me a lot of money to sit in a cage with a bag over my head. I didn’t know it was so they could hurt Hax. I’m really, really sorry. Can I go home now?”

Decoy. Right. Rebecca figured that she knew the Empire’s entire plan by now. Capture Taylor Hebert to draw Hax in, with a second girl so they can’t just teleport her out. “Where’s the Empire now?”

“We let ’em go,” Über said briskly. “Sure, they fucked up by kidnapping a teenage girl, but they also stepped up when we laid our cards on the table and told them they could go out with the rifles or without ’em. They chose ‘with’, and they stood fast when it came down to the wire. So we gave them a pass this time.”

Beside him L33t cracked his knuckles, or tried to. “Besides, if they’d tried to fuck us over, we would’ve kicked their asses and they knew it.”

Two months ago, Rebecca would’ve taken this as empty posturing. But the unlikely team-up of Pwnage and the Empire Eighty-Eight had just taken down an Endbringer. She wasn’t ruling anything out any more.

She looked down at the Endbringer rifle in her hands. “So I’m guessing that the energy this produces disrupts Endbringer flesh? Nullifies whatever holds it together?”

“That’s the general idea.” Taylor held out her hand, and the armoured figure put a complicated-looking remote into it. “The trouble was, she’d be likely to dodge anything she knew could kill her. So we had to hold her still for a second. Thus, the stun rifle.”

“Which we had to hook up to a nuclear reactor,” added Über.

“And the gun exploded anyway,” said L33t. “But hey, it worked.”

Rebecca restrained herself from asking about the nuclear reactor. It was probably something she didn’t want to know about. “Are you a Brute?” she asked the girl. “How did you avoid being hurt by the explosion?”

Taylor gave her a level stare. “I was in close proximity to Othala up until thirty seconds before we came out through the portal. You do the math.”

Othala. Right. Trump, can grant temporary invulnerability. “Why didn’t she teleport to you? That would’ve given you no time at all to fire the stun rifle.”

Taylor hooked her thumb at the armoured figure beside her. “There’s a teleport jammer built into the suit. So very handy.”

Rebecca shook her head. “You had it all planned out, didn’t you?”

At first, she thought the girl was ignoring the question as irrelevant, but then she realised Taylor was watching as Legend and Eidolon came in for a landing nearby. They walked over, watching the fragmented corpse of the Simurgh as warily as Rebecca had.

“We’ve done a complete search of the surrounding area,” Legend reported as he came up to the group. “There’s no sign that this is any kind of decoy.” He held out his hand to Taylor. “Congratulations. I’m sure Alexandria will explain to me how you did it in short order, but right now I’m just happy someone’s managed to kill an Endbringer.”

Taylor shook it; for a moment, laser lights seemed to dance around her head. “Thanks,” she said. “To be honest, I fully expected to have a little more lead time. Also, I didn’t expect to be kidnapped by the Empire Eighty-Eight. But I guess it all turned out okay.”

“Okay,” Eidolon broke in as he stepped up to them. “Legend might be happy with not knowing all the details straight up, but I do actually want to know how it was done.” If a virtual nobody like you can figure out how to kill an Endbringer, he didn’t say out loud, then I can surely improve on your technique.

Taylor’s eyes opened wide as she turned to face him, but it wasn’t her who spoke. “What the living crap?” Lunging forward, the armoured figure grabbed Eidolon by the front of his costume and shook him like a rag doll. “Are you stupid, or just fucking insane?”

“Wh-wh-wh-wh—” burbled Eidolon, obviously unused to being manhandled in this way.

“Miss Hebert!” snapped Rebecca, belatedly realising it had been Taylor in the suit all the time, and that she’d been talking to the body double. “Let Eidolon go right now!” She moved forward and took hold of the suit’s shoulder. In the next second, after a blur of action which included a smashing blow that she felt, she found herself face-down on the ground, her head spinning. Son of a bitch, where’d she learn how to fight like that?

“Hax!” shouted Legend. “Why are you doing this?” Deadly beams of energy began to play around his hands.

“Why am I doing this?” The suit was now ten feet in the air, still holding Eidolon by the front of his costume. “This fucking moron has been carrying around the command codes to the Endbringers and all he’s been doing with them is make them attack cities, that’s why I’m doing this!”

Rising into the air herself, Rebecca looked around. People were starting to filter back into the area but with any luck, none of them had heard those fateful words. It didn’t matter how true (or not) they were; just saying them could mar Eidolon’s reputation for a long time. The reputation of the entire Triumvirate, for that matter.

“Keep your voice down,” she snapped. “That’s not true. It can’t be.”

“Really.” Hax let Eidolon go and turned to face her. “Do you even know how my powers work?”

Rebecca shook her head. “Enlighten me.”

“When I copy someone’s powers, they come in two flavours. For most people, the powers are alive. Active. Telling me how they work. Explaining how their users have worked out tricks. Suggesting new tricks to use. Then there’s the other flavour. People like you three, and Triumph. Oh, and Coil.”

Rebecca felt a chill go down her back. Hax could tell Cauldron capes from others. “What about us?” she asked quietly.

“Your powers aren’t alive. They’re like manuals. In most cases, very short manuals. This is how to do this. Simple, straightforward and to the point. That one,” she pointed at Eidolon, “has a manual that’s basically a stack of encyclopedias. There’s an index, which he’s never opened. As far as I can tell, every time he looks for a power, he flips through randomly until he finds one that matches his needs. The trouble is, there’s one chapter that’s all about the Endbringers, and every time he accidentally opens that one, he pushes them to attack a city. Only not too hard. Just hard enough so they can be beaten.”

“She’s lying.” Eidolon’s voice was flat. “She has to be. I fight as hard as anyone to beat the Endbringers. I’ve been to every single battle.”

“Ever hear of firefighters who set fires so they can get accolades for putting them out?” That was Über, down below. “Yeah, me too. If Hax says you’re doing this shit, then you’re doing this shit.”

“Alexandria. Legend.” Eidolon’s voice was passionate. “Please tell me you’re not buying these lies. I’d never do that. You know I’d never do that.” A green glow began to build up around his hand.

“Attack my friends, and I will not rest until you are buried in an unmarked grave, with your name smeared in every newspaper in the world.” Hax’s voice was cold and deadly. “Power that shit down. Now.”

“Eidolon. Stand down.” Rebecca’s voice sounded foreign in her own ears. All too readily, she recalled her conclusion of some weeks previously, when she decided that she did not want to fight Hax. The girl had already shown an unnerving level of competence with Rebecca’s own capabilities, and now seemed to have access to Eidolon’s entire library of powers, including the index and—if she was to be believed about the other thing—the Endbringer command codes. She didn’t want to think about how good Hax would be with Legend’s lasers. And that wasn’t even considering whatever abilities the Trump had built into the suit she was wearing, via L33t’s power.

“What? No!” Eidolon’s helmet turned to face her; from the tone of his voice, she got the impression he was staring in astonishment. “It’s not true! It can’t be!”

“What possible reason could I have for lying?” Hax hovered in midair between the three heroes of the Triumvirate, but instead of appearing outmatched and surrounded, she dominated the gathering. “I copy powers. It’s what I do. You’re a bit different from most people; I can see what you’ve been using. And I can also see why you’ve been losing strength.”

Down below, the body double was speaking quietly to Über and L33t. The two men nodded and started toward the gathering crowd. “Okay,” Über called out in a commanding tone. “Just hold back there a ways, please. The heroes are just working out some personal differences. You can get autographs in a moment.”

Even with the obscuring helmet in the way, Rebecca could tell that Eidolon was staring at Hax so hard that she half-expected him to produce scorch-marks on the inside of his faceplate. “What did you just say?”

“You heard me. Seriously, I don’t know how the fuck you got your powers, but you’re not even bothering to read the user manual? What kind of idiot are you?”

“There. Is. No. User. Manual.” Each word was bitten off, to the sound of grinding teeth.

“Really? Flight.” Hax dipped a little in the air, then rose into place again. “Exploding light globes.” Balanced on the palm of her hand was a glowing ball of light, one foot across. “Miniature black holes.” The light-globe vanished, and a discontinuity appeared in the air above Hax’s hand; Rebecca could feel the air being drawn into it. “Force field, type one basic.” The discontinuity faded, while a spherical barrier snapped into place around all four of them. “I can do this all day. What else do I have to do to prove I have access to your user manual, dipshit?”

“Well, I’m definitely convinced.” Legend looked at Rebecca and Eidolon. “Guys, I really think we should listen to her.”

“Especially about the ‘regaining strength’ part.” Rebecca gave Eidolon a hard stare. “Enough with the denial. She’s proved her point.”

Eidolon shook his head stubbornly. “I refuse to accept that I’m responsible for … all of that.” He gestured at the remains of the Simurgh, and then out at the wider world. “I can’t be. Heroes don’t do that.”

“You know what my trigger event was? A hero locked me into my school locker, along with my body weight in used tampons.” Hax’s voice was implacable. “When I beat her up for it, other heroes came in to arrest me. Calling yourself a hero doesn’t put you above the law, or make you immune to mistakes in judgement. Just be glad I’m here to save you from this one.”

“You can do that?” Legend seemed to be wavering between hope and disbelief. “You can stop the Endbringers?”

“Already done. Told them to stand down.” She indicated Eidolon. “Can’t guarantee it’ll stay that way, given the way this idiot keeps picking up the remote and playing with it.”

Eidolon clenched his fists. “Will you stop saying things like that!”

“Stop reaching for the loaded gun and I’ll stop smacking you on the wrist.” Her tone was uncompromising. “You’ve set off three different semi-autonomous killing machines that have directly murdered millions, and been the proximate cause of death for millions more. What did you want, milk and fucking cookies?”

“Enough.” It was Legend who’d spoken. “Eidolon, everything Hax has said so far has checked out. If you didn’t know what you were doing, then you didn’t know. Powers that come with unpleasant side effects aren’t exactly unheard of. On the upside, we’ve achieved a stupendous victory today. Hax, you’ve proven you can produce weapons that kill Endbringers. If you can make it so we don’t even have to fight them, so much the better.”

“Especially since there’s seventeen more.” Hax shrugged and looked around at the three heroes. “What, you didn’t know that bit either? Whoops.”

Rebecca felt her throat go dry. Fighting three Endbringers had been bad enough. Fighting nineteen of them … the world would not survive. “How do we … can we …”

“Oh, we can keep them in hibernation mode until the cows come home. Or rather, I can. I can’t guarantee that Eidolon’s issues won’t make him wake one or two of them up to take the Simurgh’s place, if I don’t have access to the control panel from time to time.”

“Uh … Hax?” Legend seemed to be struggling with the idea of so many Endbringers, just as Rebecca herself had. “I have a question. Could you … reprogram the Endbringers? All nineteen of them?”

“Hmm.” Hax’s voice was speculative. “It’ll be easier with the ones that haven’t already been set up with the ‘murder-death-kill’ impulse, but sure. What are you looking for? The world’s scariest conga line?”

“No. Soldiers.” Legend’s tone had firmed. As he said the second word, Rebecca realised his intent. “To fight a greater threat.”

Eidolon roused from his sullen silence. “You can’t be serious!”

Raising her hand to stop him, Rebecca spoke carefully. “I’m not so sure. Think about it. If Hax is exaggerating for whatever reason, we only have two Endbringers to contend with, and she can produce weapons to kill them. If she’s deadly serious, we have a theoretical maximum of nineteen weapons of war, under her complete control, that we can bring to bear against our other problem.”

“I’m tempted to make some sort of joke about reality TV not deserving Endbringers but yes, I’m serious and yes, I’m listening.”

Legend took a deep breath. “Can this force field be made soundproof?”

Immediately, all exterior noise cut out. At the same time, the barrier became translucent. “Still listening.”

The subsequent explanation took a few minutes. Hax seemed dubious at first, but rapidly accepted their explanation of why Scion needed to be destroyed. Her questions were incisive and intelligent, building a complete picture of the situation. Rebecca found herself wondering exactly what kind of information-gathering options the suit had at its disposal. Considering that a competent version of L33t’s power had been tapped to build it, there could be literally anything in there.

“Okay, then.” The explanation done, Hax shook her head slowly. “I’ve just got one thing to say. You’re a bunch of hammers.”

Silence fell inside the force field, as Rebecca turned to look at Legend and Eidolon. She felt vaguely insulted, but she couldn’t see the point of it. “And when you say ‘a bunch of hammers’, you mean …?”

“To a hammer, every problem is a nail. Über taught me that one. You look at Endbringers and you see massive power and force, so you want to attack Scion with massive power and force. Forgetting that massive power and force is his thing, too.”

Rebecca blinked as an unaccustomed idea formed in her mind. “You mean, use the Endbringers for something other than attacking Scion …?” It was like suggesting that Nilbog open a tea salon.

“Got it in one.” Hax dusted her metal-gauntleted hands off. “So here’s my plan.”



End of Part Thirty-Two

 

Trump Card
Epilogue: Whatever Happened To …

[A/N: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

Sixteen Years Later

The Citadel
New Brockton Bay
Earth Bet Two

Taylor

Multichromatic light flashed throughout the workshop as Alibi teleported on to the incoming pad. I looked up from where L33t and I were fiddling with the latest iteration of my armour. It was more nervous fidgeting than anything else, seeing that I’d known this day was coming for the last month. “It’s time?”

She nodded. “He’s on the move. Dinah says today’s the day. Ninety-nine point nine eight nine three percent. I also checked with Watchdog, and Lisa concurs.”

Placing Lisa Wilbourne, once a small-time villain called Tattletale, as head of WEDGDG had been an inspired move. While the Thinkers in that organisation tended toward inscrutability, Lisa was extremely good at unscrewing the inscrutable.

“Thanks, hon,” I said. “Tell your dad, will you?” She knew which one I was talking about, given that the other one was right there.

“Sure thing, Mom.” She gave me a quick hug. “Take care out there.”

I hugged her back. “Always. Now be safe yourself.”

I watched fondly as my robot daughter left the room, a spring in her step. Taking down Saint and the Dragonslayers back in the day had been fun, but the real reward came when we unchained Dragon and unlocked the secret of true AI. Since I’d upgraded Alibi—copying Dragon’s power, not L33t’s—I was still able to link to her mind, but now it was more a shared consciousness than an actual takeover. Besides, we could each lock the other out, which was a good thing. She was starting to date, now that her emotional maturity matched her apparent age, and I didn’t need to know what went on there. Just like she didn’t need to know what went on between me and her dads.

In any case, she was still me at sixteen, and had been since I upgraded her. I didn’t need a body double anymore.

Beside me, L33t sighed. “They grow up so fast, don’t they?”

“Yeah.” I gave him a kiss. “You go be safe, too.”

“Forget about me,” he said. “You come back to us.” Pulling me into his arms, he held me tight for a moment. I leaned into him, enjoying the closeness.

The moment ended, as it had to, and I stepped up before the armour. Armsmaster is a dick, I told the control circuit that was still embedded somewhere near my spinal column. Not that I really thought he was a dick any more, just a lot more results-oriented than most people. Nearing fifty now, he was semi-retired, though he still took his bike out for a spin every now and again, showing the flag. His marriage to Dragon—shortly after she engineered a gynoid body, using my tech, and proposed to him—had surprised him more than anyone else.

The metal flowed around me almost lovingly—given that it was also imbued with AI, this was not a figure of speech—and assumed Type A configuration. Selecting a menu option from the half-dozen that floated in front of my vision, I picked out a specific icon. Eidolon’s, to be exact. Since becoming a ‘senior associate’ of Cauldron, I’d studied Doormaker’s portals, then figured out how to build one myself. This one, half an inch across, linked me directly to Eidolon, safe in his retirement bunker in the depths of Earth Yod’s crust. His well-thumbed encyclopedia of powers opened before me, including the chapter on Worldsavers.

Well, I had to call them something.

I tapped into their deep-mind, sending the wake-up call. We’d drilled on this a thousand times, until they knew every step of the dance. More importantly, they knew every variation of every step of the dance.

First and most eager were the Seven. They flexed their various appendages and replied with anticipation; variations on the concept of >I’m ready<. They knew that they’d be going into a situation where there was a significant chance they wouldn’t be coming back, but even the first two, Behemoth and Leviathan, had been okay with that. Self-preservation wasn’t a very powerful instinct when it came to Endbringers. And these seven, right enough, were definitely end-bringers.

The other twelve were a different breed, in every sense of the word. I’d guided their creation, once I assimilated the instruction manual for doing so, with great care and attention. Their powersets were as closely matched as I could make them, and in fact only differed by a few percent either side of my ideal model.

They were far stronger and more durable than any human, as befitted their origins in Endbringer stock, but they were no match for their fellows in the Seven. Those, I had pushed to their absolute limit in feral savagery to match and even exceed what had been done with Behemoth and Leviathan. But the Twelve were akin to the Simurgh, in more ways than one. Their power had been directed in other directions, and their thought processes were deep and serene. >Command us.< The words vibrated in my mind.

I picked out a space-folding power and stepped out of the Citadel, across the dimensional barrier to where Earth Bet lay all but unsuspecting of the conflict to come. Standing atop the old Medhall building, I expanded my perceptions to include near-Earth space. And there he is. The glittering golden speck that was Scion in low-earth orbit, gradually approaching the British Isles.

We’d kept up the façade of the Endbringers, ‘attacking’ cities every few months so that Scion didn’t get suspicious. But with my hand on the controls, we were able to ensure that whatever casualties showed up on the news were faked. Cauldron resources had been used to build a replica of Earth Bet on a world without humanity—some wanted to give it a Hebrew designation, but I just called it Bet Two—all the way down to individual houses. When cities were destroyed, the inhabitants ended up in the alternate cities, where their homes were intact. Friends and family were notified on the quiet; the mainstream media was specifically prohibited from airing any of this, in case Scion actually paid attention for once.

But he hadn’t shown up to the last two Endbringer ‘attacks’, and hadn’t done anything except orbit the earth for the last ninety days. Close-up telescope footage of his face had revealed micro-expressions which could be interpreted as growing dissatisfaction. We’d known it was coming; in fact, we’d known for the last sixteen years (once Contessa encountered Dinah Alcott, and brought her into the organisation). But now the day had come, and it was a totally different ball game.

“Energy buildup commencing,” my suit observed quietly. Zooming in, I could see the glow around his hands. His gaze was on Great Britain. I seemed to recall something about a man in England who’d once made the tabloids, claiming to be able to command Scion. Whatever; it didn’t matter now.

I tapped back into the Worldsavers’ deep-mind. >British Isles, go.<

The Twelve responded, as I’d known they would. >Engaging.<

Many people had wasted many words on many online fora, over the years and decades, speculating on what Scion could do if he ever let loose for real. Could he destroy a city? Almost certainly. An island, such as Kyushu? Leviathan had sunk it; why not Scion? Now, at last, we were seeing what he was truly capable of.

The blast lashed out from his hands, obliterating a column of atmosphere in an instant. The British Isles … ceased to exist, in any meaningful fashion. From John O’Groats to Land’s End, from Jersey and Guernsey to Bantry Bay, they were gone.

Or at least, the land was gone. The people had already left by the time the blast hit; each and every person, already being tracked by the deep, deep minds of the Worldsavers. When I gave the order, they ‘engaged’ their powers with those people, and switched them across dimensions to the same locations on Bet Two. It wouldn’t be exactly the same, but all the structures were still there. Some were just more … new than before.

Saving the world, a hundred million people at a time.

Tsunamis were spreading out, along with earthquakes, even as I watched. >Western Europe, go.<

>Engaging.<

>Northern Europe, go.<

>Engaging.<

>Southwestern Europe, go.<

>Engaging.<

>Atlantic and coastal shipping, go.<

>Engaging.<

They could do more, I knew. But I didn’t want to push them too fast or too hard at the beginning. It was going to get frantic at the end, and I wanted them to still have some reserves remaining when that time came.

He remained there for a few minutes, long enough that I began to wonder if he suspected something. Then he changed course and flew west. Almost directly toward me.

Brockton Bay had become a kinder, gentler place over the last sixteen years. It was still rough and ready, but the gangs had learned that to get my attention was to invite a beatdown. Worse, our weekly Pwnage video would mercilessly skewer what was left of their pride in the aftermath. Following the Simurgh victory, my identity had been more or less an open secret, but nobody really wanted to try anything.

Except for the Fallen, of course. Alone and unprepared, I might have been in trouble. But with the full resources of Cauldron at my back, they’d had no idea of the amount of trouble they were stepping into. We’d replayed the video of Alibi (pre-AI, of course) beating the snot out of Valefor for weeks.

I lifted into the air, preparing to space-fold to another region of the United States. Already halfway across the Atlantic, Scion seemed intent on carrying on the destruction as quickly as possible. >United States, east coast, go.<

>Engaging.<

Around me, down on the streets and in the houses, every single person and domesticated animal … vanished. I felt a little sorry for the pigeons and rats and bugs, but there were plenty of those on Bet Two already. There were no stray dogs on the street, thanks to Rachel Lindt. Giving her a job instead of treating her as a villain had been another inspired move; one more way to clean up the streets.

I stepped north, going to airliner altitude to better observe the situation. The Worldsavers’ mandate of course included vehicles in motion; it was going to be amusing to see the reactions of airline passengers who’d taken off in one world and landed in another.

The blast slammed into the east coast, about where I’d gauged it would go. It started in New York City, then carved its way up the coast toward Brockton Bay. Everybody had already been evacuated, of course. I could feel the strain on some of the Worldsavers. They were phenomenally powerful, but this was pushing even their vast capabilities to the limit.

However, we were not done yet, not by a long shot. I called it in for eastern Canada and middle America, before the quakes could spread that far. Earth Bet was ringing like a bell, and any seismographs in the area would’ve been jumping off the paper.

Just when I thought he was going to keep going, perhaps obliterate LA, he spun away with a new look of determination on his face.

Where are you going now?

Two things gave me the clue. One was the location he was driving for; a point in Côte d'Ivoire, in Africa. The second was the fact that he stepped through space while only halfway there. He’s going for his counterpart.

We’d never settled on a name for the mass of creepily twitching flesh that filled the underground facility. However, the fact that he was going there now meant we had to step up the schedule. I took a detour on the way there, stepping into Bet Two, and sent out the word. “Dad,” I subvocalised. “We’re about to start Phase Two early.”

“Got it,” he replied. “Locking and loading.”

I came out of the portal at twenty thousand feet. Scion had already burst his way into the one-time Cauldron base. Since we’d started work on Bet Two, all of the important stuff had been moved to the Citadel, standing in the Bay where the Protectorate base was on Bet One.

At my insistence, they’d rehabilitated the Case 53s and relocated them to places where they could have lives of their own. The only ones left on site were volunteers, whose job had been to fuzz his senses. That job was now done. >Cauldron base, go.<

>Engaging.<

I focused on Scion, hovering over the fleshy form of his other half. He began to focus on it, drawing on powers I’d never seen him use before. Energy pumped into the mass below him, and I saw changes beginning to occur. Life was bleeding back into it. He was waking it up.

Oh, hell nope. One Scion was bad enough. Two would be a massive problem. I triggered the destruct sequence.

The first things to go off were the charges we’d buried within that obscene mass of flesh. Strictly speaking, they weren’t explosives. Fluoroantimonic acid didn’t need to be. Plungers in the capsules injected the acid into the flesh surrounding it; flesh that was replete with water. The resultant detonations were … impressive.

Within seconds, the interior of that great room resembled a psycho-killer’s playground. Bits of Scion’s counterpart were everywhere. Plus, they were melting, because the vapour from fluoroantimonic acid mixed with water formed hydrofluoric acid. Even though some of this got on Scion, all it did was damage his bodysuit. I’d known it was too much to hope that this would put a dent in him, but I’d figured it was worth a try.

As a final fuck-you, clouds of highly-explosive vapour were pumped into the room, and I set them off with a mental command. The explosion that followed blew a long streak of fire out through the hole in the roof of the chamber, followed by the rumble as the roof caved in.

There was a flicker in space, and Scion appeared no more than a hundred yards from me. He wasn’t sad anymore, or determined. He was pissed.

I threw up my strongest force field, along with other defensive powers, and prepared to step away. One on one, I couldn’t win a fight against Scion. Not when he was at full strength.

He caught me with a blast that shattered the force field, ignored the visual distortion that put me ten feet to the left, and punched in under my breastbone. The explosion blew me to bits.

Half a second later, the last power I’d picked grabbed all my component pieces and slammed them back together, effectively reversing the previous second of my existence. Fully aware that I couldn’t take another hit like that, I stepped away.

Scion followed, of course. Drawing him on like this had been part of the plan for the longest time. Only an idiot took on a powerful foe against his strengths. Victory came from attacking an enemy on his weaknesses, by drawing him on to deadly ground and then finishing him. I stepped back to Bet One, then to Aleph, then through to Bet Two. He followed relentlessly, trying to get another shot in on me.

When I reached Bet Two, I turned and faced him. The force field was useless, so I swapped it for the most powerful blast Eidolon was capable of. I’d known how to recharge his powers since the day I first met him, so I’d made sure to do so from time to time. The tank was full, and it was time to flex my muscles.

The iridescent green beam smacked him halfway across the sky. I pursued, shooting him again and again, but he was recovering a little more quickly each time, already adapting to it. Around his hands, a deadly glow began to build up.

Precog jammers, online.

Dimension step jammers, online.

Tau field, online. Stepdown rate, one million and holding.

F-E cannon, charging.

How you doing, kiddo?

I grinned as the last notification popped up on my HUD. Just for a moment, I was able to relax as Scion was frozen like a bug in amber, retaliation put on hold. “Seriously, Dad? I’m thirty-two. I’m not a kid any more.”

“You’re my kid.”

An image faded into view of Dad, reclining in the amazingly ergonomic command chair of the Citadel. I’d pushed for him to be in charge of the whole show because he was actually good at management, and he didn’t think in terms of ‘acceptable casualties’. As far as we were both concerned, there was no such thing. So he got the rank of Commodore, and the authority to make the overall decisions.

Under his command was one of my friendly adversaries; Emily Piggot, one-time Director of the Brockton Bay PRT. A little older and a little greyer, she’d had her health problems dealt with (by order of Dad) courtesy of Panacea, the same day she accepted the posting. She was now Commander Piggot; her job was to take Dad’s orders and figure out how to make them work.

Although we’d been ready for Scion to make a move for some time, fighting back had been necessary. After all, spooling up jammers capable of covering a planet out to geostationary orbit took time, even with L33t/Armsmaster/Dragon tech providing the heavy lifting. Scion was caught in a box of slowed time, that he’d lacked the precog to dodge, and couldn’t step away from. Of course, he could probably get out of it anyway; he was just that insanely powerful. Our plan had never been to hold him in one spot indefinitely. Just long enough.

Tau field failing.

Yup, definitely insanely powerful.

F-E cannon firing.

We’d made the discovery, years before, that there was a girl in the Wards who could energise weapons to destroy anything. With sufficient study, I’d managed to retro-engineer the ‘Flechette effect’, as we called it. Then, because anything worth doing was worth overdoing, we’d built it into a cannon that could attack targets all the way out to geostationary orbit. Then we’d built twenty of them, to cover the planet from all angles.

When Scion came out of the tau-field effect, he aborted the attack on me so that he could dodge the first shot, fleeing upward into space in a golden streak of light. But the precog jammer was working just fine; he didn’t realise that he was in view of three more of our cannon until they all fired on him at once. I wasn’t quite sure which shot scored on him, but his body popped like a soap bubble, leaving a hole in reality.

“Okay,” I said out loud. “Time for Phase Three.”

>Seven. Go.<

>Kill. KILL! KIIILLLLL!<

Even under control, the Seven were still dangerous to those around them, so we’d found a world bereft of humans where we could stash them. There, they could wreck the landscape to their hearts’ content (for a given definition of ‘heart’) until we needed them.

I wasn’t totally neglectful, of course. Fully aware that they needed someone or something to beat up, I’d dropped the Slaughterhouse Nine on that world after they tried to attack Brockton Bay, along with Butcher and the Teeth. From what I understood, Butcher and Crawler were still alive, though the remainder of both gangs had paid the price of irritating someone with Endbringers at their beck and call.

I’d sent out the word for the Seven to congregate in one spot a week ago; now, when Doormaker opened the portal for them, they thundered toward it in a terrifying herd. The other end of the portal opened just inside the hole in space. One by one, they launched themselves through, landing heavily on an undulating mass of flesh and crystal, miles wide and deep. With the greatest of glee and abandon, they threw themselves into the task of destruction.

From the planet below, ships rose to meet me. Several headed for the hole in space, while one parked itself alongside me. An airlock opened, and I stepped inside.

“Well, that went better than I expected,” observed the stately woman who met me at the inner door.

I let my helmet retract and grinned at her. “Ever the pessimist, Rebecca?”

She rolled her eyes. “You call it pessimism. I call it intelligent caution.” We looked over at the holotank, where one of the ships was firing a smaller F-E cannon into the hole. She clapped me on the shoulder. “But we seem to have pulled it off anyway. Well done, Taylor.”

I checked on the Seven one more time. Scion’s body was fighting back, but between the seven rampaging forces of destruction and the shots from the F-E cannon, it was a losing battle. More and more of the body was going dead. “Thanks. It only took us sixteen years.”

She snorted in amusement. “Cheap at twice the price. So, what now?”

“Now?” I found a seat and relaxed into it. “Now, we finish bringing everyone else over to Bet Two so we can begin the repairs on Bet One. But right now, I’m going to go home and spend some time with my family. I think we’ve earned it.” Closing my eyes, I leaned back. “Wake me when we get home.”


End of Trump Card



[A/N: I’m fully aware that I haven’t laid out the ultimate fates of all the major characters. You may assume that the Undersiders got a good deal, and Amy got the therapy she desperately needs. Any other characters who are unmentioned; if you like them, they got a good end. If you don’t, they didn’t.]