Instead, he commented, "Just going by what I've heard, Assault's arguing we should take the fight to the enemy? Without Piggot's consent?"
"Piggot has told us to stand down," Miss Militia spoke. "So we'd be going against her directive."
"They attacked one of our own. Again," Assault said. "And they broke a cardinal rule. They attacked family. You don't unmask a cape, and if you happen to discover their secret identity, you don't go after their family."
"The family's testimony suggests that wasn't deliberate. Skitter informed Trickster partway through," Weld said.
Clockblocker cut in, "But we can assume she found out beforehand. Unless you're going to suggest she figured it out on her own?"
"No," Weld replied. "It makes sense. I suspect Tattletale could find out something like that. I'd even believe she's found out all of our identities by now. But I'm saying Trickster wasn't in the know, and he's the person who made the conscious decision to attack Triumph's sister."
"They've broken other unspoken rules," Assault said, looking at Triumph and Miss Militia rather than the junior members. "Shatterbird? Are we really going to let that one slide?"
"Anything goes when fighting the Nine," Miss Militia said.
"The Nine are gone. He's still breaking the rules. He kidnapped and took control of Shadow Stalker. He's affected civilians. Criminals, admittedly, but still civilians."
"And the people in charge know that," Miss Militia said. "If they decide that it's crossing the line, we can act decisively."
"People in suits," Assault said. "They sit in offices with padded chairs, viewing everything through the filter of clinical, tidy paperwork. They don't know what it is to be in the field, to face the risk of death or fates worse than death in the service of this city."
If Miss Militia had been getting ready for a response, she hesitated when Assault said 'fates worse than death', his voice revealing a tremor of emotion.
Triumph could imagine the scene as he'd glimpsed it: Battery on her deathbed, wasting away from a poison designed to be cruel rather than efficient. But as slow as it had worked, it had proved incurable.
Assault went on, and there was no hint of the earlier emotion in his voice. Rather, he sounded dangerously like a leader. "If we don't act on this, if we don't move on the Undersiders and the Travelers, then we're saying that's alright. We're saying it's okay to do those same things to us."
"You'd be violating your probationary status on the team," Miss Militia said, quiet. "Going against orders."
"My joining the Protectorate was conditional on being on the same team as Battery," Assault replied. He met Miss Militia's eyes with a level stare, as if challenging her to press the issue.
There was no doubt what was at the root of Assault's anger. Miss Militia, by contrast, was the leader of the Protectorate because of her unwavering loyalty and willingness to not only abide by the rules but to fight for them. Triumph could understand why they'd taken the positions they had.
He glanced at the others. Weld was a company man, so to speak, and the PRT was his family, after a fashion. It made sense that he'd stand by the rules imposed by the PRT, the Protectorate and the Wards. Clockblocker had always chafed under the yoke of the institution, and Chariot could easily be the same. Most Wards went through a phase like that, feeling the pressures, the strict rules, realizing that the Wards existed in part to keep them out of the worst of things, while aching to go out and be a hero. Clockblocker had never entirely grown out of it.
It could be that Chariot's stance here was what Coil wanted. Triumph couldn't forget that Chariot was an undercover operative, planted by the supervillain to gather information.
No, none of those calls surprised him. The outliers, the ones that caught him off guard…
"Vista, I didn't think you'd be wanting to break the rules like this," he commented. Before she could reply, he said, "And Kid Win. I took you for more of a rebel."
"I'm tired of losing people," Vista said. "We lost Gallant. Aegis too, and Velocity, Dauntless, Battery…"
"Yeah. And Shadow Stalker," Triumph offered.
"She left," Clockblocker said.
"I'd still consider her a casualty," Triumph said. "We might not have liked her, but she was one of us, and the enemy basically took her from us."
"I don't want to forget Glory Girl and Panacea," Clockblocker said. "She and her sister did me a life-changing favor. We don't know the whole story there, but the Undersiders or the Nine had to have played a part in how that unfolded. But that's one hell of a list of names. There's less of us than there are them, and we're losing. Not just fights, but we're losing this war. Don't you see that?"
"I see it," Miss Militia said, her voice particularly quiet compared to her raised volume earlier. "But that's exactly why I'm telling you not to do this. The second we make this into an actual war, we change it from a losing fight to an outright defeat. At best everyone involved would lose out, our enemies included. I don't want that."
"You're making it sound more complicated than it is," Assault said. "I'm talking a quick, hard hitting strike against one of their territories. One of the master-classifications would be a good bet. I'd suggest Regent, but Shatterbird is too big a complication. Better to take out Hellhound or Skitter. Doing either would cut their tactical options down by a third, and it could gain us a hostage to leverage against the others."
"Not Tattletale?" Clockblocker asked.
Assault shook his head. "She'd know we were coming. It's in Armsmaster's notes from his first meeting with Skitter. It's why they're so elusive as a group, and that's why it's so crucial we strike first, while they're still split up in individual territories. Grue, Trickster, Genesis or Imp would escape too readily, and confronting Ballistic or Sundancer would place our side at too much risk."
"They'd retaliate," Miss Militia said, "And we'd almost certainly lose. We're roughly matched in numbers, we're outmatched in raw firepower and they have the edge on us in terms of tactical knowledge."
"So we're supposed to sit here and take it?" Clockblocker asked. "If my family gets attacked next time, I don't think my dad's about to haul out a shotgun to defend himself."
"That's not exactly how it played out," Triumph said. "But no. I don't think we should take it, and I don't think we should attack. Miss Militia's right."
Assault's eyebrows rose in surprise.
"Thank you," Miss Militia said. "I understand that some of you are upset. We're all upset. We're all concerned about our loved ones, about the current state of things in the city and about possibly being captured and controlled by Regent. But we're only going to succeed with the support of the Protectorate as a whole, and we'll only have that if we stick to the rules."
