"Fascinating."
Emily watched as Professor Brooks examined the sample of alleged spider silk with great enthusiasm and a broad smile, running it through his fingers as if it was the best thing he'd ever seen. Wrapping a little around his index fingers he tugged lightly, then harder, on it, nodding to himself, before pulling out a jeweler's eyepiece from somewhere on his person and screwing it into his eye socket. Holding the material up to the light he studied it while everyone else waited, until he finally removed the eyepiece and raised his head to meet her eyes.
"It's spider silk," he said helpfully, making her sigh heavily.
"Yes, we already know that, Professor," she replied more or less patiently. He beamed at her.
"Excellent!" The man genuinely looked pleased that they'd worked this out.
"What can you tell us about the source of it?" she pressed. He looked down at the absurdly oversized thread he was holding, although it was closer to something like deep sea fishing line in her opinion considering how ridiculously thick it was, and seemed to think for a moment.
"It came from a spider," he replied after a couple of seconds. She put her hand over her eyes and reminded herself that you weren't allowed to strangle scientists or eventually you ran out of them. "Rather a big one," he added with a smile.
"How big?" she persisted. He looked at her, then down at the material in his hands, before peering about and spotting the micrometer Armsmaster held out wordlessly, having apparently come well equipped. Taking it from the Tinker's armored hand with a mutter of thanks, he proceeded to carefully measure the thread in several places, before patting his pockets with a distracted air then coming up with a scrap of paper and the stub of a pencil. Writing on the paper, he made some more measurements, spent thirty seconds staring into space with a blank expression and occasionally making a note, then another handful of seconds writing furiously, turning the paper over twice. Emily felt that perhaps someone should introduce him to the concept of notebooks…
Eventually he nodded to himself and met her eyes again. "I would estimate that the span across the legs would be approximately twelve feet, making some educated guesses at the relationship between silk dimensions and those of the spider in question."
One of the PRT lieutenants slid out of his chair in a dead faint, although no one paid any attention to him, staring in horror as they were. Professor Brooks went on with an eagerness which was appalling, heedless of the effect his words were having on them, "This appears to be dragline silk, which is the strongest type and typically the largest diameter. Silk is spun as multiple individual fibers which are adhered together to form the final thread, the diameter of which varies from species to species. This sample appears to have far more than the usual number of individual fibers, and they are also considerably thicker than those one would expect. I am basing my estimate on the diameter of the individual fibers rather than the thread as a whole because that gives a reasonable figure for the size of the spinneret glands, and therefore the likely dimensions of the spider itself. If we went purely on the overall diameter of the whole thread one would be forced to assume the spider was some sixty feet across the legs fully extended, taking a species such as Nephila senegalensis as the basis. I feel this is likely excessive."
Emily was feeling ill at this point, but the damned man just kept going, looking pleased as punch. Yet again she felt there was something deeply wrong with the academic mindset…
"As I can see there are at least fifty individual fibers present, rather than two as in the case of Nephila senegalensis, I can be fairly certain that the individual in question is far smaller than a naive approach to the calculation would suggest. Twelve feet plus or minus an error of three feet seems eminently plausible. Admittedly I'm making a number of assumptions which may be erroneous, as all we have to go on is this silk sample, but I feel reasonably confident I'm in the right ballpark." He looked quite satisfied with his conclusion, even as almost everyone else was looking like they wanted to join the lieutenant on the floor. The exception being Armsmaster who merely seemed interested and was making notes.
"Of course with further investigation and microscopic examination I could likely refine my calculations, which are necessarily somewhat crude given the lack of data. I would be fascinated to test this material. The tensile strength is likely to be substantially higher than that of Clubiona vigil which is the greatest currently known to science. I would dearly like to find out how much higher." He smiled at her, then at the coil of silk he was holding. "Absolutely extraordinary. And such an intriguing color too! I have never seen pale lilac spider silk before. I wonder if the shade will fade with time? Hmm… Must make a note." He dug out more paper and wrote busily. "Have you run any tests yourself, Armsmaster?" he asked absently as he scribbled.
"I have, Professor," the Tinker replied, looking up from his own note taking. "The material is phenomenally strong and tough, far exceeding any known biological material, and in fact any known manufactured one." Professor Brooks looked up sharply at him, his eyes glinting with interest. "Removing it from the captives was… a frustrating exercise. At least without damaging them severely."
"You found it hard to cut?"
"I found it impossible to cut," Armsmaster corrected. "At least mechanically. It notched an aggregrated diamond nanorod blade driven by a hydraulic mechanism, which I have never seen before. Even the alloy I developed for my armor isn't that tough. It is also so elastic that an ultrasonic vibrational cutter has little to no effect as the energy is entirely absorbed in the bulk material. Chemical methods were likewise resisted, although I was unable to use some of the more aggressive ones due to them having a deleterious effect on the health of the captives. And the substance resisted temperatures far higher than any spider silk on record."
"Over two hundred and twenty centigrade?" The professor raised his eyebrows in surprise and delight.
"Excessively so, yes. I finally managed to sever the filament at some two thousand centigrade, which is utterly baffling. It's an organic substance and should have been completely consumed at a far lower temperature, but it required a heavy duty cutting torch and nearly twenty seconds of application to finally break. It also appears to conduct heat exceptionally well for an organic material, which led to difficulties heating it fast enough to reach the needed temperature before the bulk of the material became dangerously hot to those bound in it. I am designing a device to apply point source extreme temperatures to aid in future efforts of a similar nature. Dragon has suggested a number of other methods that might allow it to be handled but they require some considerable design work to realize."
"Astounding."
"Indeed."
"Did you recover the material?"
"Of course. I can see multiple uses for it, and each prisoner provided nearly twelve hundred feet of the filament. Once I located the endpoint and was able to cut it where this was bonded to the rest of the material, it was a fairly simple method to unwind it as the bulk of it wasn't adhering to itself particularly well. I assume on purpose. And luckily for those bound in it, as the adhesive in question is far stronger than human skin is."
"Ah. How intriguing. It implies careful thought on the part of our spider friend."
"That would seem to be the case, yes." Armsmaster smiled a little grimly. "Although the silk over Alabaster's mouth was the exception to this. He did not enjoy the process of removing it, unfortunately. It took multiple attempts to get it all and for some reason his power seemed unable to aid him."
"Perhaps our friend does not care for Nazi ideology?" Professor Brooks seemed somewhat amused, as he picked up all his little bits of paper and put them in various pockets. "I can't find it in myself to disagree."
"No, I can't say I do either," the Tinker replied with a nod and a set to his mouth that suggested he was quite amused in a somewhat odd manner. Emily, who had slightly recovered from the information, decided this had gone on long enough and interrupted since the pair seemed quite content to exchange information indefinitely.
"The problem, Professor, is that we have apparently got a twelve foot across spider running around tying up Nazis with unbreakable silk. This is causing me some… concern."
"Oh, the spider itself is not likely to be twelve feet across, Director," he corrected with a small smile. "The body is probably roughly human-sized, depending on the leg to abdomen relationship. A long legged species such as Nephila senegalensis would have much longer legs compared to the body than one such as, for example, Phidippus borealis, or even Aphonopelma iodius, which admittedly is a desert species so…"
She cut him off with a raised hand, getting a look of mild inquisitiveness back. "Professor, I have no idea what any of those are and I doubt anyone else here does either."
"Golden orb weaver, boreal tufted jumping spider, and one or other of the so-called desert tarantula subtypes, respectively," he replied immediately. "The latter is fascinating due to…" Once again she cut him off, although he didn't seem more than mildly disappointed.
None of this was particularly helpful in her opinion. She was much more worried about the 'roughly human sized' spider with legs spanning upwards of twelve feet which spun unbreakable silk and apparently hunted Nazis for sport.
Every single part of that thought bothered her rather a lot.
"The problem is not so much the exact details of the damned thing, it's the fact it exists at all!" she remarked with some irritation. "First we have that horrifyingly large hornet from hell, which eliminates Hookwolf and makes it look easy. Now we have something even bigger and more terrifying that's taken out Stormtiger and Alabaster. I'm not exactly broken up about three Empire capes coming to sticky ends, to be honest, but I am just a little concerned about how that happened."
"Ah. I see. Yes, I can understand why some people might be slightly taken aback by an arachnid this large." She looked at him narrowly and wondered if he actually did understand. Emily really wasn't sure he was being entirely accurate there…
"Where did it come from?" she pressed, looking at him for a long moment, then around at everyone else. "The HOUS is one thing. Not a good thing, but it's barely plausible in some ways even as it's horrifying in all the others. But this thing? What the hell is going on? Is it connected to the HOUS? Is it a Biotinker at work this time? If so, is the HOUS also from the same source? Are they from different sources? That seems unlikely in the extreme, but I can't rule it out. Are there more of them?"
"And who made the phone call to alert us?" Miss Militia added somewhat uneasily, causing Emily to pause and stare at her. It was a good question indeed.
"Well, the HOUS is on record as talking, so maybe the spider does too?" Dauntless, who was looking pale, remarked in reply. "I'm not sure if I like that idea."
"It definitely talks, yes," Armsmaster put in. "Witness testimony from the Empire gang members tell us that much."
"Although they couldn't see a thing so we don't have proof it was the spider doing the talking," Assault commented. "Might have been someone else doing that, and the spider was just doing the legwork." He grinned at his own remark as everyone else stared at him, Emily grinding her teeth slightly. "Lots of legwork. Because of all the legs, you see."
"We get it, Assault, thank you," she growled.
"Oh, I came up with a name for it," he added brightly. "That's important."
"Oh, for… Fine. Get it out of your system and we can get back to the important things." Emily sighed and waited.
"Spider, Hideously Enormous," he said, looking pleased with himself. "SHE. Seems to fit."
Emily gave him a long hard look as he grinned, then decided to ignore him in the hopes he'd go away when she wasn't looking if she ignored him hard enough. It hadn't worked yet but there was still hope…
"Anyway," she said after a moment, "We either have a giant talking spider, or a giant non-talking spider with an accomplice. I'm not sure which is worse. I'm not keen on either of them, and I want to find some answers before this all blows up in our faces."
"As both the HOUS and SHE have only gone after Empire members, perhaps they're of a heroic bent, Director?" Professor Brooks seemed helpfully cheerful. "I can't see either being a problem at the moment. Hardly anyone has even seen them, no one in the latter case, and they do appear to keep to themselves."
"I don't care if they think they're heroes or not, Professor," she grated. "They're a public relations nightmare. People don't like hornets, and they really don't like spiders. Even little tiny ones. Twelve feet is not little or tiny. If the public find out about… that thing…" she glared at Assault who smirked, refusing to use his stupid name for it, "… they're going to get even more annoying to deal with than they usually are."
"I like spiders," he commented happily.
Emily sighed faintly, feeling he was missing the point rather spectacularly. "Most people are not you, Professor," she said. 'Thankfully,' she didn't say but thought quite hard.
"Ah." The entomologist shrugged. "I can't deny that."
"I wonder what it eats?" Renick mused out loud. Everyone looked at him, and he met their gazes. "I mean, something that big, it needs to eat, correct? And it's not going to be living off flies or something…"
"Maybe it goes after HOUSs?" Assault suggested. "That's why we haven't seen the thing again. SHE got it. Maybe there was an entire hive of them underground somewhere, and SHE ate the lot, so now SHE is on the surface, looking… for… other…" He trailed off, his face changing as he realized what he was saying. "Er…"
"Oh, fucking hell," someone muttered, although Emily didn't see who it was. She was too busy staring in horror at the stupid cape who was now looking very much like he was wishing he'd kept his mouth shut. Professor Brooks was staring into space, thinking visibly.
After a few seconds of silence, he blinked, then said, "SHE would only need approximately one human every week, based on spider metabolic rates, with an estimate for size and caloric intake requirements." He sounded quite pleased with himself even as everyone, even Armsmaster, gaped at him. "And a rough calculation of the food value of an average male."
Very slowly Emily closed her mouth, feeling like events were spiraling out of control and wondering what was next…
Needless to say, the meeting went on for quite a while after that.
Not that it achieved all that much, due to complete lack of any other evidence. Whatever else it was, the Spider, Hideously Enormous, was at least as good at hiding as the HOUS seemed to be. Which didn't exactly make any of them, other than Professor Brooks, any happier.
HE just looked disappointed and kept making notes, while dropping little scraps of information about spiders that invariably made everything even worse.
Emily did not go to bed a happy woman that night.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Looking at the notes she'd been taking the whole time, Taylor smiled. Armsmaster's help analyzing her drider-silk was very useful. He seemed to know his stuff.
Then she got on with her homework, feeling that things were proceeding nicely.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The wind howled through the trees outside her bedroom as Missy read PHO on her laptop. There was a huge storm forecast for tonight, but even though it wasn't supposed to peak until sometime around two in the morning from what she'd seen on the weather website, it was already extremely wild and wet outside. She was glad she was warm inside and had no requirement to go out. Her shift at the PRT building wasn't until tomorrow afternoon when hopefully this would have blown itself out, and she hoped that Carlos and Dean were safely inside the PRT building tonight. The severe weather warnings had been going out since yesterday, urging anyone without a very good reason to be out and about to stay home. Falling trees were a distinct possibility, along with enough rain to drown Leviathan. Not to mention gale force winds, not quite hurricane level but more than bad enough.
She was light enough that the wind could potentially literally pick her up and blow her away, something she had no desire to experience. Her name wasn't Dorothy after all…
An especially strong gust made the house creak audibly and she looked up at the ceiling, wondering if the roof was going to be there in the morning. Considering the wind now was only about half the strength it was supposed to hit later, it wasn't as unlikely a possibility as she'd have preferred.
Trying not to think too hard about that, she went back to reading the thread on the capture of Stormtiger and Alabaster, which had PHO speculating even more wildly than usual. There were rumors going around that something really weird had been involved, but no details yet, even from people who seemed to have an insight into the workings of the PRT that implied they knew people who worked there, or were people who worked there. Several commentators were arguing about whether it was the work of the HOUS again, while others were suggesting all manner of other possibilities ranging from Myrrdin being bored and doing it to amuse himself, an undead Eidolon coming back from the grave for reasons unknown then vanishing again, the Simurgh playing games, angry dock workers seeking revenge for some insult made by Nazis, that one guy who claimed it was a lizard that did it, and several other even less plausible alternatives such as Panacea going rogue and kicking ass.
In other words the usual sort of thing.
Missy found the idea that Amy was wrecking Nazis very funny, actually. Not least because she was fairly sure that the older girl probably could do it if she really had to, and because she suspected the person who posted that idea was Vicky. Probably laughing her head off at the time.
She was pretty certain that whatever had happened had been even stranger than the majority of these silly ideas, if only from the look a lot of the people at the PRT building had worn last night. Quite a few of the senior staff had been wandering around with quickly-hidden worried expressions, while Director Piggot had seemed very thoughtful and somewhat concerned. Missy was quite good at divining the Director's moods in general and that one was not a happy one. Even if the woman was on the whole looking far healthier than she had ever done, which made Missy suspect Amy had been involved somehow.
It was something of a mystery, overall. The various posters that were obviously Empire supporters seemed on the whole more confused than anyone else, too, which made it even stranger. She'd also heard a rumor from one of the troopers she was on good terms with that word on the street was that Kaiser was in an absolutely furious mood for some reason connected to the capture of the two E88 capes, above and beyond the capture itself. Losing a huge stockpile of weapons, which had apparently been the case, presumably accounted for that. Especially if it was due to either Stormtiger or Alabaster screwing things up, which was one theory that seemed to have quite a lot of traction and some circumstantial evidence behind it.
She personally doubted it was the HOUS. Nothing had exploded or burst into flames and none of the Empire idiots had died, as far as she knew, and considering that the single time the giant hornet was known to have involved herself in the Empire's activities Hookwolf had gone down like a lead brick dropped into the bay, that seemed persuasive evidence against the insect's involvement. On the other hand, there was no evidence that the hornet was particularly bloodthirsty either, only that if you pushed it too hard it had ways to express its displeasure no one wanted to encounter. So maybe it had done something?
Missy didn't know, and neither did anyone else. But her gut told her it wasn't the HOUS behind whatever had happened.
What was behind it she had no idea at all.
But as long as two more Empire capes, especially ones as dangerous and vicious as Stormtiger and Alabaster, were off the streets, she didn't really care all that much. Not to mention what sounded like several truckloads of weapons and ammunition. It could only help no matter what did it in her view.
Hearing the windows rattle, she put the tablet down on the bed, got up, and went to look outside. The poplar trees in Mr Anderson's back yard three houses away were flapping around like crazy, and as she watched someone's trampoline flew past, apparently migrating south for the winter. She watched somewhat wide-eyed as it bounced off a garage roof, flipped end over end, and vanished behind the buildings.
"Wow," she muttered, impressed. "It really is windy and it hasn't even started blowing properly yet!" By the looks of it this was going to be one of the storms people talked about for years. The last one as bad as this was probably going to be had been when she was eight and she still recalled seeing one of the taller brick chimneys from the old glassworks a couple of miles to the west in pieces all over the roads. The street had been closed for a week, forcing a lot of traffic to take long diversions, including her school bus, while the city cleared the mess up. People still brought it up in conversation even now when discussing a storm and how bad it was.
The girl flinched as a brilliant flash of blue-white light strobed across her field of view, followed a few seconds later by an enormous rolling BOOM of thunder. The entire house shook as the the echoes died away. Blinking away afterimages, she worked out that from the delay that had only been about a mile away, and even as she thought that the rain, which had been coming down fairly heavily for a while, turned into an absolutely torrential downpour. It was so hard she could see spray bouncing off the road and forming a fog thick enough that the car headlights were visibly dimmed by it.
"Holy crap," she murmured, watching in fascination. She'd seldom seen rain that hard in her life before. Several more lightning strikes came from around the city, a couple behind her and one directly in front, right down on the waterfront in the direction of the docks. The afterimage of the forking bolt remained burned on her retina for several seconds, while she blinked rapidly. It looked to her like it probably hit one of the dock cranes which were over that way, normally quite visible against the skyline but currently lost in the rain. The thunder arriving about twenty seconds later suggested her estimate of distance was fairly close, too.
Pulling her chair closer to the window Missy rested her elbows on the sill and propped her chin in her hands, watching the fury of nature outside and profoundly glad she was inside. It was impressive to look at but she had no wish at all to be out in it.
She wondered what, if any, damage would be left behind when this finally blew itself out. Hopefully nothing major.
Some time later, after a surprisingly calm meal with her parents, she was in bed half-asleep listening to the wind roar outside when the entire house shook for several seconds, a distant rumbling sound coming through the windows even over the sound of the weather some time later. She got up and went to look out into the night, wondering what the hell it had been. Nothing was visible, no signs of a massive explosion or anything of that nature showing anywhere, although it had felt like something like that. Puzzled, she went back to bed and grabbed her tablet, to check PHO and see if anyone else had heard it.
Fifteen minutes later there were only rumors and people asking each other what it had been, from all over the city, but no actual answers. Feeling her eyelids get heavier, in the end she put the tablet away, turned the light off again, rolled over, and went back to sleep. She'd find out in the morning.
It probably wasn't anything major, as she hadn't heard any sirens other than the normal level of background problems the city always had. Even those seemed to be rarer these days…
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Deep under the reef, the sound of the ship rolling from side to side as the waves hit it passed through the drillipedes as waves of subsonic vibrations, growing stronger every now and then when the wind gusted more strongly. In the water, the metallic groaning was loud and continuous, crabs and other creatures easily detecting it a mile or more away. Taylor was nearly finished with emptying as much life that came under her domain, which was a remarkably large percentage of it, from the danger zone, as far as could be arranged. Anemones and barnacles were going to have to take their chances, but almost every crustacean, copepod, and nematode had spent the last few days fleeing. Very slowly in many cases, but the bulk of them were likely to be safe.
She'd gently urged the various octopus species living in the reef to leave too, and anything else she could influence that was mobile enough. By now about the only reasonably complex lifeforms in or near the reef were her constructions, two crabspiders monitoring it, one inside the bay and one in deep water well outside the projected collapse zone outside it. She had plenty of swimming crabs in the area too, to make sure she had a very good picture of what was going on.
Picture being something of a misnomer in some ways, she thought as she combined the sensoriums of thousands of creatures into a whole in her mind, with the ease of long practice. The sheer force of the storm-driven tide had been quite a lot greater than the forecast had suggested, the water rising a good four feet above the not quite ten it would have been otherwise due to surge, and the currents around the ship being significantly more intense and turbulent as a result. Even as it was coming in it was running fast and rough, stirring up the sediment far more than usual. The high flow rate past and under the ship had mostly scoured away all the fine stuff easily lifted by the current over the decade and a half or so since it sank, meaning that even while the tide was running the water normally stayed fairly clear. It had a lot of larger debris in it, such as seaweed, fragments of wood, pollution in the form of pieces of plastic of a wide range of sizes and types, and occasionally something bigger, but the really fine stuff that made it visibly opaque was mostly absent. Except in areas right next to the hull where it got deposited on one tide and removed on the opposite one, leaving eddies of silt swirling locally around obstructions.
But now… Now the water was like chocolate milk to her crabspider's eyes when it lit the bioluminescent organs, the green glow illuminating the area immediately around it brightly but being completely absorbed within a couple of feet. On the surface, the waves were brown and muddy as they crashed on the shore and around the Rig's support legs, while foam was building up and blowing across the roads nearest the waterfront in a way that was seldom seen. Any normal human and a lot of Parahumans that happened to find themselves in that water would have drowned in moments. It was still well below the temperature that most people could handle for long, the currents were ferocious, and a lot of larger debris was swilling around in it too. Ripped up tree branches, the remains of a couple of small boats that hadn't been moored correctly, logs and other driftwood washed off the beach from well above the usual high tide line, old nets dragged up out of the mud… you name it, it was floating around out there being a hazard to navigation.
The harbor patrol were going to have their work cut out for them when this finally blew itself out, she mused as she monitored the entire bay very carefully, keeping a lookout for anyone stupid enough to get too close as well as other things. Luckily the average Brocktonite, while possessing insufficient common sense to stay far away from cape battles in some cases, had a very healthy respect for the sea when it was angry. Especially right now because it wasn't just angry, it was pissed.
Exactly as she'd hoped, and in fact exceeding her expectations considerably. This storm was going to be one for the record books.
The lightning that crashed down regularly and hit tall buildings, the force-field of the Rig making it ring like an enormous bell, and surprisingly often the water, added a flickering surreality to the whole thing which was remarkably cinematic in a somewhat gothic horror manner. She was watching from multiple places around the bay high up and appreciating the sheer beauty and chaos of the whole thing, while sad she couldn't share it with anyone else. Her dad would have loved to see it the way she could, and Lucy probably would too, but…
Oh well. She could at least describe it to him, which she was doing while the pair of them sat in his room next to the window and looked out across the city through the streaming rain. It splattered on the window in gusts with a rattling sound, occasionally small hailstones coming with it. The lights were off and they were just admiring the raw fury of nature. He had a pair of binoculars in his hand, and was peering out at the distant wreck, barely visible when lightning illuminated the entire bay brilliantly blue-white with a tinge of violet. Luckily it was occurring often enough that the whole thing was like a disco strobe on a massive scale was in action, so he got a pretty good view.
"I haven't seen a storm like this since… about ninety nine or two thousand, I think?" he commented after one sequence of lighting strikes walked across the city from one side to the other in a couple of seconds, successive bolts hitting down one after another in a ripple of vast energies being unleashed by the clouds. The sound of the thunder that roared over them and made the whole house vibrate and rattle lasted for nearly fifteen seconds and utterly destroyed any ability to talk to each other. When it ended both of them had their hands over their ears and were grinning.
"Better than the fourth of July," Taylor shouted over the sound of another rather quieter but still very loud rumble of thunder from somewhere behind them.
"Yeah. I hope it doesn't hit anything important," he shouted back.
"Got the Medhall tower about a dozen times, the Rig's soaked up at least twenty hits, and there's a couple of fires off to the north where trees came down, but the rain's so hard it's already nearly put them out," she reported, having been keeping tabs. "And someone got their roof blown off but they were in the basement so they're fine. Lots of minor damage all over the place, loads of trees across roads and that sort of thing, and a few small car accidents, but so far nothing really serious. Ooh. That was a big one." They blinked at the afterimage of an enormous tree of violet-blue fire that had sprouted over the docks for a couple of heartbeats, then flickered out.
"Looks like it got one of the DWA cranes," she told him when the echoes had died down. "No real damage but some cables melted, I think."
"Damn. OK, that's happened before, it's easy enough to fix," he sighed. "The hardware isn't as important as the people. Hopefully everyone paid attention and is safe at home."
"Or in Pat's place," she grinned, making him chuckle. "Lots of people there complaining about the storm and drinking all his beer. While taking bets on how bad it will get."
"Yeah, they do that," he smiled. "They'll be safe in there. That place has lasted more than two hundred years and will probably still be standing after Judgment Day. With Erwin propping up the bar and shouting for service…"
Giggling, Taylor checked the time. "Looks like the tide is nearly at its peak. Another… ten minutes maybe? The current is really going for it. It's at least half again as fast as usual and still picking up. I can hear the ship moving already. Honestly I'm not convinced it wouldn't tear loose even if I didn't do anything at this point." The lack of visibility didn't make a lot of difference to her ability to watch everything. Her creatures had a vast array of non-visual senses at their disposal and she now had an awful lot of experience handling them all and combining them into a remarkably holistic overview that made mere sight pale into near-insignificance, at least underwater. Sounds from far below human range to far above it, subsonic vibrations through the ground, electrical changes in the water, pressure waves from currents and eddies, chemical traces from thousands and thousands of sources everywhere, and others too esoteric for her to even describe properly, they all added to her ability to observe.
It should have been utterly overwhelming.
But to her, these days, it was simply how she worked, and as natural as breathing. Merging millions of sources of data together into an overarching mental map that covered the entire city at this point was just second nature, allowing her to observe everything to a level she wasn't sure even her dad really understood although she'd tried explaining it. How could he? Even her own power seemed slightly stunned by what she was able to do now, and without her abilities it was probably impossible to really get more than a vague understanding of what she was doing all the time now.
If she wanted, she could focus on every single person in the entire city, all four hundred and fifteen thousand, three hundred and twenty eight of them, and watch them all independently. She didn't, as such, but she could. Mostly she kept the vast majority of them in the peripheries of her awareness, something that was actually about the least she could do since all this was pretty much automatic now, and just kept part of her manifold mind on watching for specific danger signs. The more she'd done it, the more this had become automatic, to the point she was starting to wonder how much of it was being done by the arthropods themselves having learned in their own tiny way what to look out for. It seemed plausible, bearing in mind what her power was doing, especially now since she'd pushed it into being far more cooperative and versatile, that quite a bit of her mental processing might be effectively utilizing the insect brains and whatever as a sort of coprocessor, in computer terms. She wasn't certain, and hadn't yet come up with a way to check for sure, but it did somewhat fit what was going on from what she could see.
Yet another thing for the notes and future experimentation.
All her level two creatures were consolidating the creatures in their range into a global awareness, and expanding her own presence through them to everywhere. She could feel them watching with interest, their much higher than natural intelligence curious and alert, as she gently rode their senses and through the those of millions of other lifeforms all throughout the volume of her expanded range. In her dad's bedroom, all her glowspiders were also watching with them, one on her dad's lap where he was gently stroking it, another on her head, and the rest sitting on the windowsill, every one of them apparently appreciating the show as much as the pair of them were.
The crabspiders throughout the city and bay, mostly deep underground or underwater, were also feeling intrigued by everything, each of them able to experience what she did. Every one of her level two creatures was, from the viewpoint of her power, essentially another body of hers, which had confused it and still did, but had also proven to have all sorts of interesting side-benefits she was still discovering. They all seemed perfectly happy with this from what she could sense from their minds, which made her feel contented. They weren't human smart, but they were smart enough to be affectionate, and she considered them friends, which seemed to be reciprocated.
"How did the prep work go?" he asked in a loud voice over the howling wind and another spatter of sleet mixed with rain on the window. "Is it ready yet?"
"Yeah, it's right on the verge of going," she replied, lowering her voice when the gust dropped to merely very high wind rather than actual gale. "I can feel the rock shaking. I've got drillipedes ready to take out the last bits as soon as the current peaks."
"Give it a few minutes past that to really build up momentum, then dig it out," he advised, making her nod understanding.
"OK. About… probably six minutes now," she replied. They waited, both humans and all the glowspiders, as more lightning rained down nearly as much as the actual rain. Another massive strike backlit the ship brilliantly, a fraction of a second before two smaller ones hit it directly. "Ooh. I actually felt those," she said with a grin. "The entire thing vibrated. Wow."
Far under the surface, the sound of the ship clanging from the strikes reached her crabspider, echoing off the seabed and adding to the mental picture she had of the area. She was still working on improving the sonar mapping ability but already it was nearly as good as some forms of insect vision, albeit in a rather different way. The reef was groaning as the ship leaned further over, pushed by millions of tons of water urgently trying to escape captivity. The stresses on the rock were building rapidly, compressing it and causing thousands of microfractures to emit a faint but detectable constant crackling sound that her drillipedes could easily sense.
"Just about ready," she said. A harder vibration rattled the reef, some crabs and other creatures inside the ship around where the rocks penetrated the hull letting her see one of the smaller rock outcroppings had actually snapped loose. "Um… it's going to go any second now," she added. "The stern is starting to move and one of the outcroppings just broke."
"Better cut it loose then," he said with a smile, not looking away from staring at the ship silhouette as more lightning lit it from all sides. "I've wanted to watch this for your entire life, although I never thought it would happen like this."
"Enjoy it, Dad," she chuckled as her diggers jumped into action, rapidly drilling out the few remaining pieces of reef she'd carefully left behind as she undermined a huge piece of it over the last few days. Rock powdered under their jaws, large chunks disappearing into their gullets and wherever the hell it really went once that happened, and she could almost immediately feel the reef itself start to rumble. "Here it goes," she added as a massive chunk broke free, sliding ponderously down the steep side into deep water. Seconds passed as it gathered speed, the sound roaring out through the water and probably audible tens of miles away if you were listening. Certainly every one of her creatures in the entire bay heard it easily, over a period of several seconds.
A metallic groaning started, and the bow of the ship began, ever so slowly, to dip lower and move seaward at an angle. "I can see it moving," he said almost breathlessly as another lightning bolt lit the bay brilliantly. "It's actually moving. Jesus…" Her dad sounded almost shocked as well as very happy.
The grumbling and cracking in the rock grew louder, and the metal on stone sounds increased steadily. She watched the ship continue to move very slowly down and towards the open ocean, the rock below it beginning to crumble in more places. Directing some of the drillipedes to change direction, she dug more of the reef out near the stern, then in the middle, connecting several tunnels together. One last rockworm burrowed up through the middle of the largest outcrop, then rapidly withdrew when the stone fractured and began to slide.
"That's it," she said with satisfaction, the current and waves hammering the ship and pushing it remorselessly over. The enormous force of the thing heeling unstoppably crushed the perforated reef below it, until with one final incredibly loud roaring rumble that went on for nearly thirty seconds, several thousand cubic yards of rock separated from the main reef and tumbled down the underwater slope, carrying half her drillipedes and tens of thousands of tons of wrecked ship with it.
She wasn't worried about the worms, they could take the abuse, and was very satisfied indeed about the ship.
So was her dad who was on his feet, still staring through the binoculars, whooping with glee. "Wow! Fucking amazing job, Taylor. Look at it! It's going… it's going…" He was tense and excited, making her grin as she watched too, both with her human eyes and all the other senses at her disposal. The old container vessel rolled to port, slowly at first, but with gathering speed, and the superstructure hit the pounding waves with a huge splash, even as the hull itself sank stern first under the water. Within seconds only spray could be seen on the surface, then it subsided to leave only the rolling waves raging through the inlet above a tide that suddenly had nothing to block it. The current picked up to an extraordinary level, far higher than it had been, within seconds as the bay tried to empty itself and equalize the near ten feet difference between inside and outside it currently had. Their house shook as the shockwaves from the collapse of the reef gave a good impression of a minor earthquake, people all over the city getting out of bed in alarm to investigate what was going on.
A positive tidal wave of water spread out at high speed, as her efforts resulted in a real if small tsunami, luckily going out towards the open ocean. She could sense reflections from the bottom bouncing upwards to the surface, some of them interfering with the rest of the waves and either enhancing or diminishing them as they added to or canceled each other out. A number of much greater size waves rolled into the bay as a result, but none of them were dangerously large as far as she could see at the moment. Even so she was fairly sure there was going to be minor flooding in the lowest-lying parts of the city, which helpfully were also mostly the emptiest parts. There was no one at risk as far as she could tell but she was watching carefully just in case.
The big wave on the surface rushed out down the inlet to the Atlantic, breakers rolling up along the coast on either side well above the high tide mark, even a storm driven one, and carrying away an enormous quantity of detritus with it. Along with thousands of tons of sand, mud, and pebbles, leaving bare rock scoured clear behind it. "Oops," she muttered as she watched a number of beaches vanish in moments. Luckily they weren't particularly nice beaches, and the storms would bring the sand back eventually. It happened fairly regularly that one big storm took a beach away and another one restored it, but she'd never seen all of them go like that. It was kind of impressive and she wasn't sure whether to be embarrassed about what she'd had a hand in or pleased.
It was a lot more material removal than most people could claim to have arranged, that was for sure. Not that this was something she could really talk about…
Inside the bay, the effect was even more impressive, although mostly below the water rather than above it. Luckily enough as she suspected people would be less than entirely pleased to see the shoreline move that much without warning. The reef crumbling away had deepened the inlet by a good fifty feet across at least three quarters of its width, and this having essentially removed a sort of step that trapped millions of tons of deep silt behind it, along with the raging torrent roaring out of the bay, made all that sediment begin to move. As she watched, rather stunned since this was far more than she'd realized would happen, the silt began sluggishly flowing over the edge of the remaining reef, moving faster and faster as eddies and whirlpools both resulted from it and stirred it up. On the surface the water went entirely black, with the consistency of thin mud, while two giant whirlpools formed, one on either side of the inlet and rotating in opposite directions.
She stared open-mouthed at the sight, wishing she had some way to record it, because no one would ever believe her. The huge quantity of water forcing itself out of the bay caused more and more turbulence, stripping deeper and deeper layers of silt from the floor of the inlet, right down to the bare rock nearest the narrowest part. The effect stretched well into the bay itself as the removal of silt near the entrance allowed the other material it had held in place to move as well. The effect was of a very slow and muddy underwater avalanche, gradually gathering pace as far more silt than she'd expected picked up speed towards the ocean and flowed over the edge of the reef into deeper water.
Even while all this had been going on, the ship had tumbled down the steep slope, the bow snapping off halfway down. "The front fell off," she commented to her dad, who grinned as he lowered the binoculars after scanning the bay entrance.
"As long as it's outside the environment, that's good," he replied cheerfully. She giggled, still watching as the remains of the container vessel hit the mud and rocks near the base of the reef, several other parts breaking loose and vanishing into the silt as they'd expected. Most of the reef debris was also either already sunk into it, or subsiding into the thick mud.
Then the sediment from inside the bay arrived in an immensely heavy cloud, which hammered down onto the remains of the wreck and the reef, thrusting it hard into the silt and spreading out over square miles of sea bed. More and more showered down along with smaller pieces of the reef, either from the initial collapse or dislodged by the weight of the material flowing over it. Within a minute or so the wreck was under at least twenty feet of mud in the shallowest areas and still getting more on top. "Holy crap. This is going a lot bigger than I expected," she commented in awe, looking at him then back out the window. She started describing what she was sensing as he lifted the binoculars to his eyes again.
"Christ. I can see the whirlpools from here," he commented, sounding stunned. "Must be the current flowing past the edges of the inlet into the channel, I guess. Holy shit, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that in a boat…"
"They go down about a hundred feet and they're full of debris like logs and stuff," she reported. "You'd get crushed to pieces. It's like a couple of blenders."
"I've never even heard of anything like that other than in legend," her dad remarked, shaking his head. "You've outdone yourself."
"Thanks. I think," Taylor laughed. "Looks like we're going to have a much deeper bay too as a result, at least way over there. The current is pulling out a hell of a lot of silt. Some of the ships in the graveyard are even moving there's so much shifting down there."
"It should stabilize fairly soon, I'd think," he told her, finally lowering the binoculars. "It looked like the whirlpools were getting a little smaller, and I can see the tide has gone out quite a lot already. With the ship gone, it's flowing a lot more easily."
"Yeah, they're shrinking, definitely, and the water speed is slowing a little. The bay is big but it's not that big compared to the ocean." Taylor interlaced her fingers and cracked her knuckles. "For my next trick…"
Chuckling, he patted her on the shoulder as she grinned. "That'll do, Taylor. Don't show off."
"Me, Dad?" She gave him an innocent look. "Would I do that?"
Peering at her, he raised an eyebrow, then shook his head and went back to looking out the window. Standing next to him, Taylor felt contented. She'd done a thing that would help a lot of people, only slightly wrecked some beaches, and even now had her drillipedes digging their way out of the mudslide and finding any incriminating evidence to make it go away. Starting with the reef itself since that was the part people might see. Everything else was going to end up buried under a hell of a lot of mud, far more than they'd thought likely, and while she'd deal with it just to be safe, she suspected not even Armsmaster was going to put in the effort to dig down to it to have a look.
He was, in fact, currently studying his instruments on the Rig and frowning, while making lots of notes, as well as talking to Dragon. By the sound of it he'd worked out what had happened, having more than half expected it, and didn't seem at present to have any suspicions that it wasn't the result of nature showing it was more than capable of doing whatever the hell it wanted if it felt like it.
Exactly as she'd hoped, and to her great satisfaction.
All in all things worked out rather well, she felt. And they'd had a nice dinner earlier too, which had tasted even better knowing that something everyone in the city had wanted gone would soon finally, after long last, be gone.
They both looked out the window for a little longer, then went to get ready for their respective beds. Her glowspiders remained watching for a little longer but followed shortly, all of them scuttling away happily and mostly vanishing into various parts of the house.
Out in the bay, the waves gradually subsided back to just normal if rather enthusiastic storm waves, the whirlpools dissipated, and the current dropped off dramatically. By the time the storm blew itself at dawn, the city was waking up to a breezy and damp day and a lack of something that had been there for far too long.
And, after quite a lot of confusion, there was much rejoicing.
