Interlude protectorate

"They had a low-level infection," Panacea said. "Eventually they would have started mutating into non-human monsters."

"So, Harvest infected an entire new world?" Piggot asked.

"They weren't infectious… yet," Panacea said. "But once the virus reached a critical level, the changes would happen rapidly."

"Their clothes were infected," Armsmaster said. "We have bio-tinkers investigating and they think that the virus would be a class S threat on its own."

He switched on video.

A seemingly dead rat in a cage was injected with a green fluid, and moments later it twitched. It staggered to its feet and then lunged at the researcher.

"Zombification occurs when dead flesh is infected," he said. "When live flesh is infected, this happens…"

A different rat was twitching as parts of its flesh bubbled and changed. The video sped up; the time stamp indicated that ten minutes passed before the transformation was final.

The result was a monstrosity that was at least as aggressive as the zombie rat, but seemingly more intelligent. It had a tongue almost as long as its body that almost caught the researcher by surprise.

"We took the samples from their clothing, and we allowed it to replicate in a solution. Twenty rats infected, and while the mutations were similar in scope, there were small variations. Not all rats had the tongue; some of them were able to climb walls, and others had enlarged teeth and claws. They were universally aggressive and tried everything they could to pass the infection along."

"This is the reason that dimensional travel is banned," Piggot said. "There's too much chance that you'll bring something… unexpected back."

"What about Harvest?" Velocity asked. "Is she likely to infect people?"

Panacea shook her head.

"I had a chance to look at her biology," she said. "As far as I could tell, she doesn't have blood or a circulatory system. She has lungs, but they don't seem to be connected to anything. When she says she is immune to disease, I'm inclined to believe her. That being said, if she has viral spores on her, she could spread them to others."

"She could bring monsters to the Bay," Piggot said. "And eventually the world."

Vista frowned.

She'd spent overnight in quarantine until Panacea could examine her, and she should have been angry. Instead she looked thoughtful.

"She says she doesn't target heroes," Vista said. "And I believe her. She told Shadow Stalker that she'd been the one who'd triggered her, and the worst she did was make snide comments."

"That doesn't change the fact that she's a mass murderer," Piggot said. "She killed fifty people in broad daylight, in full view of the public. That's a direct challenge not just to the gangs, but to us."

"She told me she'd killed over three hundred people," Sophia said. "And I believe her."

"How dangerous is she now?" Velocity asked. "If the kill order is activated."

"She's not as fast as you," Vista said. "Not yet anyway, but she'd run rings around the rest of us. She disarmed five hundred people in just a few minutes while they were shooting at her."

"I wouldn't want to fight her," Shadow Stalker said. "She's faster than Oni Lee was, and she doesn't need grenades. She can teleport more than a city block at a time, and she can drop anybody into her inventory, and then drop them off onto some hell world."

"She doesn't attack heroes," Vista said. "But if she decides that we aren't heroes, I think it'll go badly for us."

"She won't be shoving me into some kind of extradimensional space," Clockblocker said smugly.

"She'd just blast you to death, take a more effective version of your power, and then the whole world is screwed," Shadow Stalker said.

"Vista could stretch my arm," Clockblocker said.

Vista shook her head.

"I really don't want to be pulled into some of those places she goes to," she said. "She said she dropped Echidna in a world so radioactive a normal person would be dead in less than a minute.'

"Probably just made her stronger," Sophia said.

Piggot wasn't sure whether she was talking about Taylor Hebert or Echidna. In the end, she supposed it could apply to either of them.

"Are you sure that we can't persuade her to give herself up?" Kid Win asked.

Gallant spoke.

"I had a chance to observe her when you were attacking," he said.

The wards had been hiding nearby in case their abilities could help in some fashion without putting them in unnecessary risk.

"Her emotions are muted," he said. "All except anger. She is always angry, but I think that she's not even aware of it anymore. I think her powers are messing with her emotions."

"Wonderful," Piggot said. "It'd explain her sociopathy."

The door to the conference room opened, and a staffer stepped into the room.

"This is a closed meeting," Piggot said. She felt uneasy; Gardner knew better than to interrupt a full meeting of the Protectorate and Wards, and he wouldn't do so unless it was important.

"It's raining Asians," Gardner said.

"What?" Piggot asked.

"Check the news, Channel 9," he said.

Armsmaster pressed a button, and the screen shifted.

A horrified looking reporter was standing in Empire territory. Bodies were still falling behind her; there was a pile of bodies at least four feet tall.

"This is Trish Williams, Action News reporter," she said. The reporter looked frightened, as though she was ready to run at any time.

"Ten minutes ago, bodies began falling out of the sky," she said. "No one knows why this has happening, but an hour ago, there were explosions in six different buildings in the Docks region."

"She must be dropping them from the air," Piggot snapped. "Get up there and stop her."

By the time the fliers in the group reached the area, the rain of bodies had ended.

"She was gone by the time we got there," Aegis said an hour later.

"And the bodies?" Piggot asked.

"Identification is still pending, but those we've been able to identify belong to the ABB," Armsmaster said. "According to the BBPD, the six buildings are on fire in the Docks area are suspected to be ABB fronts, and forty women were released from ABB brothels. They claimed they were saved by a woman made out of silvery metal."

"She'd just gotten that power," Vista said. "From one of the giants."

Vista's visor had recorded the entirety of their encounter in Raccoon City, but nothing except a view of an alley in the second world.

This frustrated Piggot; it would have been helpful to get an idea of the girl's limits by watching her in combat against other opponents.

PRT thinkers and experts were going over the footage with a fine-toothed comb to learn what they could. Preliminary notes indicated that her powers had advanced incredibly in the days since Echidna.

There was concerned that if she continued to get more powerful exponentially, even the Triumvirate would not be able to deal with her.

"The Empire has heard what happened, and there's a running battle downtown. Hookwolf is leading the charge," A PRT agent beside her said. He was in contact with the people at the switchboards.

Piggot cursed.

"We need all hands-on deck," she said. "Stalker will be on console duty, since she seems to create S-class threats even as a civilian. Everyone else needs to be out in the field. We need to lock this down."

Shadow Stalker began to protest, but she went silent at a look from Piggot. If she'd really created this threat, there would be a reckoning to the best of Piggot's ability.

The sound of explosions from the dock area made them all grimace.

"I think Harvest will be there," Vista said. "Since she's planning to kill both groups, she'd love to have a chance to have all her targets in the same place at the same time."

"This will not happen!" Piggot said. "The PRT will have troopers out in full force, and the BBPD will cooperate. This is a major operation with several hundred normal combatants."

"Who are we likely to face?" Clockblocker asked.

Piggot stared at him.

"Hookwolf, Lung, Bakuda, Bakuda's bombs…Purity has left the Empire at least. It's possible that either side might have hired mercenaries from Boston or from further afield. Be ready for anything."

She watched as a line of PRT vans left, some with heroes in tow, the others with officers armed with the best ordinance they were allowed to carry.

She cursed the girl; it was likely the girl had intended for this to happen. Killing the ABB and making their deaths public was sure to be seen as an opportunity by the Empire. They were sure to attack, ad then she'd be able to kill them off faster.

The fact that she was putting an entire city at risk didn't seem to bother her.

Piggot decided that she was going to sign the order when this was all done. The girl was a walking disaster area, a serial killer and a mass murderer. The fact that her targets were universally bad people did not excuse her behavior.

The one thing that almost made her hold back was that every assassin that failed would only make the girl stronger. Still, there were people with strange esoteric powers in the world, powers that no one would have developed any kind of resistance too because they were too exotic.

All it took was one success and the whole thing would be over.

She went upstairs, ready to watch the whole debacle on her screens. She had a feeling the entire thing was going to be a clusterfuck.

**********

Overturned cars were on fire, and there were civilians huddled inside storefronts, staring outside fearfully.

Dean could feel their fear, all of it, and it made him want to pull his hair out. Sensing emotions wasn't a power that came without drawbacks.

It tended to make you a little cynical sometimes, knowing that people's public façade often covered a host of nasty emotions.

That wasn't healthy, and so he did his best to compensate for it by being as nice as he could to people. Feeling the love and joy people felt sometimes helped push those emotions away, and he found that most people were better than they thought they could be.

It was the people who pretended to be better than everyone else who often had a rotten core.

Now he could feel nothing but terror from the townspeople and anger and fear from the combatants.

"I can feel combatants around the corner," Gallant said. "There are at least twenty. I can't tell how many are on each side."

The PRT agents around him nodded.

Missy nodded too.

"I can hit the roof and then make their bullets go somewhere else," she said. "Harvest showed me I could do it with rocks."

"Do it," Dean said. He took a deep breath, and then he told the agents "Let's go."

There was a spike in terror from around the corner, although it faded away rapidly as they approached the corner.

Harvest was standing in the middle of twenty fighter. They were all on the ground, dying, and she was standing and grinning at Gallant.

"Freeze!" the agent next to him shouted.

His gun went flying toward the girl, and as the agents around him began to open fire, she turned silver, and stood there, allowing them to shoot her.

It wasn't clear whether she had been hurt at all.

The fact that the emotion in the front of her mind was amusement suggested that she hadn't been hurt that badly. The rage was still there, with a feeling of satisfaction as she stared down at the dead Nazis and Asians.

"Hopefully this will all be over by the end of the day," she said casually. "Bakuda was trickier that I thought, and she's already moved her lab."

The PRT agents aimed their foam throwers at her, but she was already gone. Looking up, Dean saw that she was a thousand feet in the air, staring off in the distance. She vanished a moment later.

"We need to keep forward," Dean said. "Save the civilians, try to get the combatants to stop fighting. Detain them, and if they try to kill you, orders are to defend yourselves."

All they found as they moved forward was dead combatants. There were civilians who had been injured in the fighting, but they all talked about having been healed by a metal skinned woman.

They wouldn't have such a worshipful tone of voice if they'd known that she was the one who'd caused the whole thing.

Harvest was a mass murderer, and given that at least a third of the dead had died due to her distinctive power use, now strong enough to decapitate and bisect some of the victims, her number of victims kept going up.

Dean had seen the videos of the girl fighting zombies and monsters. He'd been unable to follow her as she blinked from monster to monster. She wasn't limited to two-dimensional space either. She could run up walls, float in place, and teleport.

Her mover powers meant you were dead before you even knew you were under attack. Worse, the person you were fighting today wasn't necessarily the person you'd be fighting tomorrow. She kept pulling new techniques out of her butt, and because she could go to other Earths, they didn't have to be anything anyone had seen before.

"We should have brought body bags," he heard a trooper say.

"After we make sure the citizens are safe," Dean said. He hoped the others were having better luck.

The only thing that kept the body count from being worse was that Harvest was stopping to heal the citizens who'd been injured.

She'd already directed them toward cleared areas too. Did she feel guilty about what she'd started, or was this an attempt to stop the kill order from taking place?

They finally found Harvest lifting a car off a trapped woman. She could have inventoried the car, but instead she was choosing to push it off of her.

Was she doing it simply to increase her strength? Or was she doing it to improve her relationship with the public, to create a public outcry when the kill order occurred.

Her rage was greater than it had been the last time he'd seen her, and the amusement was gone.

"She's been putting bombs in people's heads," she said. "Forcing them to be suicide bombers. Not everyone here is ABB."

For the first time, he felt guilt from her. It was suppressed by whatever her power was doing to her, but it was there, and it was fueling her rage.

"These are innocent people," she said. "And they're being forced to go out and kill themselves."

"We haven't seen anything like that," Dean said.

"I've inventoried as many as I could," she said. "Hopefully you'll be able to identify them, and give their families some peace."

Now that she had carefully pushed the car over, he saw a wire running from the woman's head to the car.

"If I inventory the car, the bomb will go off," Harvest said. "I've got some demolitions' skills, but this is Tinkertech, and I don't think I'm competent. You're a tinker. Come take a look at this."

Dean felt a sudden feeling of horror. He pretended to be a tinker to cover the nature of his real powers. He had no idea what to do.

"I'm patching your feed into Armsmaster," Sophia said. For once she didn't sound angry; she sounded professional.

"I can see what she's done," Armsmaster's said. "You'll need some tools; ask trooper Johnson. He carries a pack with him in case of tinkering emergencies."

"I need the pack," Dean said to trooper Johnson. How did he feel about being a pack mule for the tinkers? He'd never felt anything but pride from the older man.

"The pack," Dean said again.

"Yes sir," the trooper hurried to open the pack on his back, laying it out flat on the ground. The tools inside were small, but each one was numbered.

"I need you to take tool number forty-nine," Armsmaster said crisply. "And then I need you to get a closer look at the assembly she is wired into."

"Why would she do something like this?" a trooper asked. "Can she just use remote control?"

His voice was muffled using the noise canceling technology in the helmets, but Harvest seemed to hear him just fine.

"It's to slow me down. She's hoping I'll waste time with this while she gets away."

A man turned the corner, and he stopped as he saw them. He began running toward them, his arms windmilling. Dean didn't need to see the terror on his face to know that he was one of the victims."

Harvest grimly gestured with her hand, and a moment later the man exploded into a gout of ice. Gallant could feel the cold even from three hundred feet away.

"You didn't even try to save him," Vista shouted.

"I can only keep people locked away in inventory for three minutes… and only two at a time."

She hesitated, and a moment later a woman and her child appeared next to them. Both were Asian, and both looked terrified.

She re-inventoried them.

"I'm full and every time they pop out, there's a chance it's their last time. I don't have any powers that can stop the bombs, and so the best I can do is find Bakuda, and make her stop. But I don't have any power that can find her."

Dean hesitated.

"What if I gave you my power?"

"I'd have to beat you until you were unconscious," she said after a moment. "What power do you have?"

"I can sense emotions. She'll be the only one who is happy with everything that's going on."

And maybe letting her feel the emotions of others might make her less callous.

He could hear the protests from Shadow Stalker, Piggot and Armsmaster, but it was already too late. She hit him ten times, so rapidly and painfully that he didn't have time to react.

A moment later, he woke to find sweet relief. His whole body still ached, but it was as though he'd been healing for three or four days.

She looked down on him.

"I can't heal you the rest of the way for another two minutes, and I've got things I have to do. If I get a chance, I'll heal you when I can."

With that she was gone.