12

Early Wednesday Morning, January 19th, 2011

Brockton Bay, New Hampshire, Earth Bet

Hebert Residence​

"Miss Hebert, something is wrong." Prometheus' voice came from my phone, but I was already moving after I heard the scream and the other voices.

Had Sophia tried to break into the house and found our surprise security measure? Who had she brought with her?

I activated the emergency beacon on my phone as I threw off the covers and stood, only to hear it beep flatly in response. A glance at the screen confirmed that there was an error: no network detected.

"I believe the signal is being jammed by a nearby device, Miss Hebert. I cannot overpower it with this device's transmitter," Prometheus said.

That was more planning than Sophia had ever seemed capable of. Someone competent had to be helping her, then.

With Prometheus of little help for the moment, I pocketed my phone in my pajamas and ran to Danny's room. In the dim light from the street coming through the closed blinds I could see he was already sitting up in bed, looking toward the window.

"Dad, we're under attack," I said, and lifted the landline phone from where it was on his side table.

The phone line outside the house was buried. Hard to cut. Whoever planned this would have expected Sophia to just ghost through the door and let them in, leaving me no time to call for help with a landline.

"Taylor, what-"

I held up my free hand to stop him there and finished dialing.

"Console," came a man's voice at the other end. An adult voice. Probably one of the troopers who covered when the Wards weren't on duty.

Something big whumped into the front door downstairs.

"This is Taylor Hebert. My home is under attack; I think it's Shadow Stalker and other unknown assailants. I don't know what happened to the PRT squad by my house. They're jamming cell phones. Please send help."

"...Understood, ma'am," the voice said, now tightly serious. "Try to stay safe, a squad is minutes out."

I hung up the phone. "No time to talk. Hide, I need to go deal with this," I said, my voice grim, and ran out of the room despite Danny's protests.

I couldn't let myself get trapped in an enclosed location with assailants with unknown abilities and weapons about to burst in. That was a lousy situation to fight in, and Danny would probably try to help despite not being prepared for it. It would get him injured or killed. I needed to get out, to draw the enemy away from Danny and give myself room to maneuver. I needed the benefits of mobility and surprise.

My bedroom was on the second floor in the back of the house. I lifted my window and went out, rolling with the fall to avoid injury.

The frozen grass crunched as I landed, and the cold hurt my bare feet as I stood. I pushed the pain aside and circled around the house towards where I knew the PRT van should be, just a bit down the road.

The front doors were open, and the two agents had been dragged out. I couldn't see the one on the far side, but the one on the near side was laying on the ground unmoving.

I sprinted over, my feet landing just so to avoid making any sound.

He still had a pulse. Peeling open one eye I saw a dilated pupil. Concussed or drugged.

Had someone re-armed Sophia with tranq bolts?

"Is that her?!" Came a young masculine voice. I snapped my head up toward the sound.

It was coming from a figure dressed all in black save for a helmet with a white skull motif. Grue.

He was running towards me.

Behind him on the porch one of Bitch's dogs was trying to push in our front door, which was visibly dented inwards. Bitch, in her street clothes and cheap dog mask, was next to her car-sized dog on the porch. On the lawn just off the porch Tattletale, in her purple catsuit, was leaning over the prone figure of Shadow Stalker. Stalker was wearing one of her old hockey mask vigilante outfits, hand crossbow discarded on the ground next to her.

I didn't have a plan, so I improvised with the first thing that came to mind.

"You are likely to be eaten, Grue," I misquoted Zork, projecting savagely cheerful, eager anticipation just before he came within reach of where I was standing between him and the downed agent.

He hesitated for a split second at not finding the fearful target he no doubt expected, and that was enough for me to get my hand on his right arm.

He reacted by flooding soupy darkness around us and tried to yank his arm out of my grip, hoping I would be distracted by being suddenly blinded. It was a smart move. But through his arm I could feel his movements, the shifting of his weight. I knew where the rest of his body had to be, even completely deprived of sight.

Darkness was no protection from me.

I twisted his arm and rolled it into a painful joint lock, getting myself behind and to the side of him. Then I hooked my left leg around his right so it couldn't move and used my right leg to kick out his knee sideways while my pressure on his arm kept me upright.

The knee crunched in a horrible way and he collapsed with a scream that was muffled by his darkness before it receded.

"Angelica! Hurt!"

I went for the downed agent's sidearm, and dumped my power into guns until I felt a wall after four charges. I suddenly knew I was holding a Glock 19, a reliable Austrian-designed police and military sidearm with fifteen rounds that I now knew exactly how to use.

I looked up to see the massive, car-sized form of Angelica bounding towards me, each step a tremor I could feel through the road on the frigid soles of my feet.

Assuming the musculature created by Bitch's power was at least as dense and resilient as regular muscle, the pistol bullets would be unlikely to penetrate deeply enough into the muscled behemoth to reach the body of the dog inside. The organic shell did have two obvious weaknesses however, each nearly the size of a basketball.

With certain movements almost too swift to follow I racked the slide, lifted my gun arm, and let my finger rest on the trigger safety as if I'd done it a million times before. With my pulse hammering in my ears I adjusted my aim as the beast got dangerously close, knowing exactly where I had to put my sights to account for distance and movement.

At the right moment the pistol spoke twice in my hand with two resounding cracks as I put one bullet into each of the beast's eyes.

It howled and skidded to a stop in the road only ten feet from me, unable to see where it was going.

"Angelica! You fucker!" Bitch screamed at me, and began running in my direction.

"Bitch, no, don't!" shouted Tattletale after her.

I waited a second, but it became clear she wasn't stopping.

"Sorry," I said. I aimed at her right knee and squeezed off a shot. She went down with a shriek, clutching at the wound and swearing.

Movement from Shadow Stalker caught my eye. She'd recovered enough from being electrocuted to stand, load her crossbow, and was taking aim.

I mentally gauged the bolt's likely flightpath, and martial arts knowledge I possessed came to mind. Bullets were too fast for humans to react to, as were arrows from high poundage bows and crossbows. But there were martial artists who practiced dealing with slower arrows, and a hand crossbow that could be quickly cocked with a short integrated lever was far from high poundage.

My body tensed just so, I saw her arm tense to pull the trigger, and before the bolt leapt into the air I was moving. My offhand came up and out and followed me around as I twisted in a full circle like a whirling dancer, catching the lethal broadhead bolt and holding it up as I came to face forward once again.

I finished the movement by snapping my gun arm up to cover her and Tattletale, the latter of whom shakily raised her hands in the air.

The catch was a stupid party trick, really. If you could catch an arrow you could easily dodge it. But it was a good way of showing off. Or, in this case, intimidating the enemy with a show of apparent invincibility.

And maybe an angry and unkind part of me wanted to demonstrate just how beneath me Sophia was, at this point.

"That will be quite enough of that," I said, my voice dripping scorn.

"Fuck you, Hebert, you-" Sophia had cocked her crossbow again and was loading another broadhead bolt.

She just wasn't ever going to quit, was she?

My simmering anger with Sophia became a flash of white hot rage. The memories came of her every petty attack on Taylor, of her trying to kill me, all of it over and over, violent and senseless, and I found my mercy and restraint exhausted. I was done.

My bullet would have caught her through the left eye, but she misted just in time.

Did her power have a precognitive component to it, or was she just that practiced at thugs shooting at her that she could anticipate when to mist?

No matter.

I dropped the bolt I'd caught and sprinted towards her, another bullet forcing her to mist again after she reformed. I just needed to get close and I could deal with her the same way I did the last time.

She didn't want to let me get close though, evading me by backpedaling across the front lawn. But she was also frustrated and wanted to shoot me, and that meant she made the mistake of staying solid long enough to finish loading her broadhead and loose it at me.

I gauged the bolt's trajectory again and twisted out of the way so it would fly past, raising my gun and shooting in the same motion.

My bullet caught her in her right shoulder. She reflexively dropped the crossbow held in that arm and screamed in anger and pain. Yet she misted again in time to evade my followup shot and moved off quickly into the dark in shadow form.

She was running, and I didn't have a way to stop her. All she had to do was stay transformed long enough to lose me in the dark. Damn it!

I huffed in frustration and turned completely towards Tattletale, who had wisely kept her hands during the fight up and far away from the holstered pistol still on her hip. Was her power telling her not to fight me? At this distance I could reliably shoot the gun out of her hand before she could aim it at me, so it would have been good advice.

"You win," she said, and desperate, naked fear came across in her voice. "Please, Shadow Stalker didn't tell us you were a cape."

I padded toward her, still covering her with the gun, until I was close enough that we could talk without being overheard by the two injured Undersiders behind me.

"I'm not a cape, or a parahuman," I said.

"You're...you think you're telling the truth," Tattletale's eyes widened. "What? That can't be right. Delusional?"

The last word seemed to slip out, and her look of surprise turned back to fear.

I offered her a level look that cut off whatever she was about to say, and lowered my voice. "You're one of the strongest thinkers in the world, Lisa. Your power can tell you something about anything you see. It even bypasses the thinker immunity Scion, Eidolon, and the Endbringers use. But there's always a bigger fish, isn't there?" I said.

Tattletale paled. I was implying that there were things scarier than parahumans, and she'd just pissed one off. My knowledge of her preferred name and of her power would make that claim somewhat more credible. And likely also send her towards terrifying conclusions. I wished I knew what else it was telling her, though.

I could guess that it had told her that fighting me was a bad idea from the way she immediately surrendered, likely from the way she saw me moving, but what more?

It was impossible to tell what an inference engine the size of a continent might put together from whatever tiny clues I was giving it, and that was concerning.

"So let me guess," I continued, voice flat and unamused. "Sophia's condition for joining up was getting revenge on me, and Coil pushed you guys to help her do it. Alec isn't here meaning he couldn't be bothered to stop playing video games. You went because you're terrified of Coil, and the others went along for the money."

"...Yeah, pretty much," Tattletale said, terror in her voice like she expected me to snap my jaws and eat her without warning. "Shadow Stalker said she wasn't going to hurt you, just scare you."

I scoffed. "And you knew she was lying, but you didn't have a choice because Coil has a gun to your head, so you convinced the others. He probably told you to do what it took to keep Sophia in the group. Am I right?"

Tattletale's posture slumped. "Yeah. I didn't have a choice."

I sighed heavily. I was angry at her, yes, but hard-earned legal knowledge reminded me that I couldn't really hold her actions against her because she'd been coerced by Coil. And she probably hadn't intended to actually let Sophia kill me. Even the threat of death if she didn't comply wouldn't have excused that.

My thoughts raced. I needed to deal with Lisa in a way that would get Tattletale out of Coil's hands, and keep her from telling anyone anything about me that I didn't want them to know. Maybe I could even recruit her later, if I earned some goodwill now? Her power had a thousand uses. It might even be able to tell me useful things about my power or its origins.

It would be blunt, but there was a way I could free Tattletale of Coil and open the door to recruitment by earning her gratitude.

"Coil's real name is Thomas Calvert," I said after a pause, and Tattletale gaped. Whatever she'd been expecting me to say, it wasn't that.

"He's a PRT consultant, which is how he gets a lot of his information. The rest he gets by using his power, which is a precog-like ability that allows him to model two different universes where he makes different choices, then choose the one he wants to keep. The rest of his information he gets by doing things in dropped timelines, like kidnapping and torturing his underlings to death to find out things about them," I continued.

"It fits," Tattletale said, hushed. "I was right, it's not probability control at all. But then that means he...oh that fucker!"

I nodded. "Yeah. I don't know how many times he's tortured simulated versions of you, but I'm sure he has. Sometimes he doesn't even want information, he just does it because he likes hurting people."

Tattletale visibly gritted her teeth and straightened her back.

I lowered my gun.

"I'm planning on telling the PRT everything about him shortly. Coil and his Bond villain base will be dealt with. Now that you know how his power works I'm sure you can get out of town and dodge him. Find an empty hunting cabin in the mountains or something and hole up. The PRT will be here in maybe two minutes. You need to go, Lisa."

Tattletale reflexively grimaced at my casual use of her adopted name, and then hesitated and looked at her teammates moaning on the cold ground.

"You don't have time to carry two injured people, especially without a dog. Calvert won't kill them in lockup. He might kill you because you know too much. I'll do what I can for them. You need to go, now. Get out of town. At least for a few weeks."

Tattletale sighed. "Okay. I don't know why you're helping me, but thank you."

I waved dismissively with my off hand. "I'm angry, but you're more of a kid who's made some bad choices than a genuinely bad person. And I can cut you some slack because your power's been mucking with your head, telling you to create conflict by saying the wrong things."

Tattletale's eyes widened at that, first in surprise and then in a wince of pain. Did she try to turn her power on itself and it didn't work out? Unsurprising, if so. That would be the first thing I'd do to lock it down before sending it out if I were Scion.

"How old are you?" she asked.

I paused to level another stare at her, and decided to ignore the question. It was best for now not to feed the inference engine any more about myself than I had to.

"I hope I can give you some better options," I said, and spared a glance in the direction of the departed Sophia Hess. "Except for Sophia, you're probably all redeemable." My gaze came back up to meet Tattletale in the eyes. "You can help do good things for the world, Lisa. Go find something better to do with your life than villainy. I'll probably have some work to send your way. Just don't tell anyone anything about me, or I'll have to act." My voice hardened. "And I will know. You understand?"

A pale Tattletale nodded once. "Yeah, I get it," she said, and with only one last look toward her teammates she turned and ran off between houses into the dark.

I'd largely controlled that conversation. Considering who I'd been talking to that was an accomplishment. I guess having a massive, inexplicable information advantage and the threat of death was what it took to actually put Tattletale on the back foot. Had the information advantage somewhat wrong footed even her power? If it was scrambling for answers it would explain why she hadn't had anything very cutting to throw at me.

That, or she was just too scared to say other things that came to mind.

I really wished I knew what her power had told her.

I found the boxy cell jammer in a bag that had been strapped to the now half-shrunken Angelica. I flicked the power switch, and briefly considered what to do with a now passed out Bitch and incoherently moaning Grue before I settled on ignoring them. The downed PRT agent was still unconscious, as was his partner, who was lying on the other side of the van. I was relieved to find their vitals alright, though.

"Prometheus, please split off a fork to keep an eye on Tattletale. We need to make sure she doesn't talk to anyone about me," I whispered into my phone, once I was well enough away from the two injured supervillains.

"Command acknowledged, Miss Hebert."

The fork would find her cell phones and any other electronics she kept nearby and use them to keep tabs on her. It would be possible for her to speak to someone else without the fork knowing, but she would have to ditch it all first, and that would be as good as confirmation that she was trying something as actually catching her red-handed would be.

I jogged back to the house and shouted up to tell Danny everything was okay. He tried to open the front door a few seconds later but couldn't with how warped it was from the dog trying to bust through it, so he came out through the back with my coat and shoes. I put them on and asked him to bring out a knife and a towel. When he returned I examined Bitch. Fortunately the popliteal artery that ran through the knee was unbroken, so tying the towel around the wound was enough for the moment.

That worry settled, I used the knife to get Angelica out of the disintegrating mass of the former dog monster. After I pulled it out the dog ignored me and laid down next to Rachel, licking her.

I returned to sit on the front steps. Danny took my hand from where he sat next to me.

"You did the right thing," he said.

"I know," I replied. "And I'm okay. But thank you for worrying."

He gave me a long look, and didn't say anything.

While we waited my mind worked, too hopped up on adrenaline to be sleepy despite the hour. As this had happened that meant that this wasn't a simulated Coil timeline, so either my power interfered with Coil's somehow - a dangerous assumption - or...he just wasn't using it for this.

Which would stand to reason, actually. Why waste a timeline just to hedge his bets on a subordinate's punitive raid to hurt some high school girl?

If he didn't know that I'd killed Victor - and he shouldn't - then all he knew was that Sophia lost a fist fight to me before I ran off. Which didn't really make me sound like a definite cape. And if I was, well, sending most of the Undersiders along was an adequate amount of overkill to hedge the bet. At worst, he would probably figure they'd escape and tell him about a promising new parahuman he could 'recruit' one way or another.

I'd cost him three capes and badly injured another, if Sophia even went back to him after this. He would be very interested in me now.

I needed to move up my plans to deal with him. I would have to make Piggot aware of everything she needed to know about him using my Scientia persona as soon as possible. There just wasn't time to deal with him myself. About all I could do immediately by myself was order Prometheus to drain his accounts. It would hurt him, but he could still come after me.

I suppose I could out him publicly. That would probably send him running, though. And it wasn't impossible he would guess it was me merely from the timing. No, that wasn't a good solution either. It would have to be Piggot.

That left the question of the Undersiders. After Coil was dealt with I could probably hire Tattletale. Her power would be damned useful for figuring out things I didn't know from Worm, and it would keep her out of trouble.

Brian and Rachel...since I was telling Piggot things anyway, I could tell her what she needed to know to recruit them, and resolve Rachel's legal problems. I couldn't guarantee it would happen, but I'd give it my best shot. They would both be happier as probationary heroes, rebranded in some other city. Brian could get help with Aisha, and hopefully the PRT could find a job for Rachel training dogs. And maybe some professional help with learning to relate to humans.

Alec would probably skip town as soon as he found out what happened.

It wasn't long until Velocity arrived, pulling me out of my thoughts. His eyes went between me and the borrowed gun I'd set down in easy reach on the porch just in case Sophia came back. I'd left the broadhead Sophia had first fired at me next to it.

"Taylor?" he asked, before looking away from me to take in the scene. "What happened here?"

I sighed, and ordered my thoughts. "Shadow Stalker joined the Undersiders and convinced them to help her get revenge on me, somehow. They ambushed and I think drugged the agents in the van, then Stalker tried to go through my front door only to get electrocuted by the Christmas lights strung up behind it. I heard her scream, and called the PRT by the landline when I saw my cell phone was jammed.

"Then I went out the back, circled around looking for help from the agents only to find them down, and there was a fight when I was seen. Me against them and one of their dog monsters. Stalker kept trying to use lethal force," I held up the broadhead bolt for emphasis before setting it back down, "and I managed to shoot her in the shoulder with a borrowed gun before she fled. The others are injured. They and the drugged agents need medical attention, especially the girl I shot in the knee. Can you please call it in?"

"Jesus Christ, kid," Velocity said, surveying the drugged agents, injured supervillains, damaged door, and dog monster shell that was messily shedding layers of muscle as it shrank.

Finally he turned back to me. "Are you hurt?"

I shook my head. "No. We're fine. Cold though." I stood, helping Danny up. "I think we'll go inside and go back to bed. If the PRT wants to ask me questions about what happened they can schedule a time through my attorney. Or better yet, I'll write up a play by play and send it in. Good night, Velocity. Thank you for getting here so fast. You'd better call some ambulances. I'm sorry for the mess."

"Yeah…" he said, sounding a bit lost as he raised one hand to toggle his earpiece.