Web of the Weaver: Chapter 23

“So, Detective Harding, I take it my advice was useful?”Harding looked around the park, but he didn’t see me.

I had my bugs hidden in the trees and in the grass, and there was nobody close enough to listen in, save for my little microphone I’d put in the grass, preset for when I’d asked him to meet me here, in a park on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

But I didn’t want to make people think that Orb Weaver would only be able to touch them at night.Using my voice in the day produced a little more confusion. A little more sense of omnipresence.

“Yeah,” he said, leaning back against the tree. I could feel him with my swarm, but not see him. If I got in line of sight, I couldn’t rule out the danger that he might be able to tie me to the voice.

How, I wasn’t certain, maybe by noticing I was watching him, but it would be foolish to underestimate an experienced police officer.

So I was at the other side of the park, buying an ice cream cone.

“Yeah, it was. Got some stuff, more stuff vanished.”

“To the E88?”

“To Sergeant Lorimar,” he said. “Guy’s part of the E88, but he’s been here forever, and anyone who goes up against him in the squad room has…”

“Poor luck?”

“Yeah. The guys in the evidence room work with him. If you contradict what they say they got, suddenly people are looking at you.”

“And if Sergeant Lorimar were to come to a poor end?”

“What type of end are you talking about?” He tensed.

“Would it bother you? He’s killed before, by proxy is nothing else. But no.”I waited until I could sense that the detective had calmed down slightly, tiny bugs on his clothes letting me know he’d relaxed his stance. “What is needed is utterly damming evidence that forces the Empire to cut him loose.”

“Like what?”

“A news story? You needn’t trouble yourself, detective. You’ve given me a name. I’ll take it from here.”

“Right…”

We spoke a little more, but clearly the detective wasn’t willing to trust me with all he knew. I bet he’d fed me the information about the sergeant as another test to see what I would do.

And then he went to his car, and I finished my icecream cone.

Part of me wanted to keep hitting the Empire, finding their caches and such.

But that would establish a pattern.

And once you had a pattern… No, if I established a pattern, it would be because I was setting a trap, not because I was getting sloppy.

And the price of Empire drugs had gone up. Not by a great deal, but a little. I’d heard some grumbling at Winslow.

Not much. Nobody brought drugs to school, at least not unless they were very careful. Not since Blackwell had been replaced.

But it was time to go to one of my hideouts and take a look at the bounty the Empire had given me. I’d had to take the bus to a smaller town, about twenty minutes away from the Bay. A little bedroom community where many professionals lived, commuting into the Bay to their jobs while their kids went to schools where you didn’t have to worry about gangs.

I’d used my Numberman card to make purchases and then fed part of the money I’d taken from the E88 stash back into the card account from an ATM. I didn’t like it—it made me dependent on whoever actually ran the Numberman system, but I’d been able to find no confirmed case of the network being subverted—and I’d looked. If anything, most of the claimed examples were fraudsters… fraudsters who had a statistically unusual tendency to come to bad ends.

But I had made my purchases, spending over a thousand dollars, more than I’d even spent in my life—and here I was. The wasp nests I had established by the doors were quiet, my power keeping my security system from going wild. Anyone else would just find themselves accidentally annoying a wasp nest that had somehow survived over the winter.

Unusual, but in a world of superhumans, not that unusual, especially since the interior of the building was warm. My work, with millions of insects moving, bit by bit, old insulation from other parts of the building to pack it around my work area.

I brushed the dust off my work table and opened up the old safe the warehouse office had while opening a few books, swarms of bugs getting ready to let me keep reading as I worked.  When I’d first found the safe I wondered what was in it.

Dreams of finding millions in gold had died when I finally opened it, finding the mummified remains of a decades old sandwich.

But it had both been practice in lockpicking and a way to conceal some of my items.

After all, I couldn’t do this at home. Improvement at school or no, I don’t think Dad would accept this was just a house project.

And then, I got to work on my first remote drone.

Drones could send me information, routing it through the internet, and nobody would easily be able to see where I was. It was an artifact of the distributed Internet and phone system, something that was an example of non-tinkertech design that had Earth Aleph being a little envious.

I thought they were idiots. Creating a network of independent internet nodes wasn’t us being smart, it was us being desperate. Every city had stories of services being lost due to a parahuman battle, malfunctioning tinkertech device or the PRT shutting things down due to a basilisk hack by some cognito-tinker. Every time someone died, so a number of businesses, assisted by anonymous angel investors with a lot of money, had come up with this system. Hundreds of cheap nodes, and it worked around damaged areas, and if the PRT had to shut it down, they could do so gracefully, both restricting the type of information transmitted and area it could be transmitted within.

Of course, sending information to the drone was more dangerous, which was why most tinkers used direct control systems.

Just like me, only I was… I smiled as I bent down, creating a tiny compartment with several pressure-sensitive controls in it. Very sensitive controls. I’d taken time to learn how to do this, reading electronic manuals while practicing whenever I had a chance. And now, I’d see if it had worked.

It was almost time to go home when I was finished, and I decided to test it. A large spider walked into the control capsule, putting its legs on the touch units, and I…

The drone shot up like a rocket, smacked into the ceiling, and hit the ground, one of the plastic fans detaching.

Okay, just a little bit too much pressure…I made certain the body of the drone was okay, then put it back. I needed to get home, and this wasn’t something I would need for a while.

Because I also had to fit the cargo rack to it so I could drop off microphones, small explosive devices… or pheromone packets.

As I left, thousands of insects rose behind me, depositing dust over the table, covering the floor, obliterating my footprints, even as spiders wove cobwebs around the safe.

Before I was out of the room, it looked like nobody had been in my little workshop for decades…

But in a few days, I’d have my drone ready—and as far as anyone could tell, it wasn’t being controlled by any detectable means. Hell, if I wanted to, I could forgo the live feed, and just record it, which would leave the drone completely dark.

Hopefully, I’d eventually figure out how to use my bugs for visual perception to the accuracy I wanted, but for now, this was a good workaround.

To say nothing of the payloads I was working on.

But now I had someplace to be before I returned home. I had another target. And a secret weapon.

*****

On the way home, I took a little detour. Both the Empire and ABB used casinos to launder money. The Empire focused on “American” games, including slot machines, poker, and roulette.

Like most slot machines, the Empire’s were mechanical. The glory days of the electronic machine might still be present on Earth Aleph, but on Bet, even quite minor tinkers, could rig something that could break through most mundane securities—and the price of making a slot machine proof against them was high. Very high. While telekinetics would be able to subvert a machine, they were rarer and couldn’t hand their powers out in a box.

As I walked through the street by the All American Casino, swarms of tiny insects moved up through the floor, working their way through the carpets, and then into the base of the machines.

It didn’t take long to get into them, or to start creating a map of the mechanical reels that determined a win or a loss. I couldn’t stay too long, but I had enough time to fix the settings in my mind, quickly drawing a few images on my phone as I kept walking.

And giving orders. Here and there spiders spun webs around the reels. Stopping them at certain points. Better yet, the mechanical force of the stoppage would tear the webs away. It would, for all the world, look like just very bad luck that the All American Casino would have 5, 50,000 dollar super jackpots trigger in one night, to completely random guests.

That was important. The Empire couldn’t risk retaliating against them, because this would become known and hurt the casino, and they wouldn’t find any pattern or signs of cheating, because there were none.

And I wouldn’t ever return.

Just some ghostly bad luck… or some ghostly attacker, hitting them in their pocket book, raising their paranoia… and all it had taken was some research on slot machines.

Not bad work for a single day. Mom was right—if you need to move the world, a little knowledge made for a dandylever.

But now it was time to start planning on how to deal with a certain corrupt police officer.

As I continued home, my phone beeped.

I took it out, and…

I didn’t recognize the phone number.

Huh. I wasn’t used to being on the receiving end. Had the Empire… No. I couldn’t be unreasonably paranoid.

I kept my bugs moving around, making certain that nobody was coming towards me.

That was being reasonablyparanoid.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Taylor Hebert?”

“Speaking?”

“I’m Brian Laborn, Aisha’s brother. She said you were having a study-buddy session tonight, but she forgot her phone.”

Oh.

Oh.

“I… She never said anything about that to me.” I paused. “Perhaps she—“

“Dammit!” My bugs flinched at the shout. “Sorry, sorry, not you. She’s out somewhere, I should have made certain to have someone—“ He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, I’ll have to call my D-boss.”

“Wait.” I frowned and thought about it. Aisha wasn’t exactly a close friend but she was… well nice. And pretty, and she didn’t have a filter on her speech which wasn’t always a survival trait in the Bay. “Is this something that could get her in real trouble?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s my study partner. If you have a general idea where she is, I”—and my bugs—“can try to find her. I’m assuming she wouldn’t go into the E88 or ABB parts of town.”

“Nah, the Boardwalk. She was talking about that Earth Aleph—dammit!”

Why is he so tense? His voice, his attitude. Was he that controlling, or was there something about Aisha I didn’t know?

“I’ll call my Dad, and we can meet at the North End. That’s where the movies are.”

“Yeah. Right, I can do this without getting… other people involved.”

“No need for that,” I told him. “After all, people my age run out to see a movie all the time.” Granted, I’d only done it once, with Emma.

There was a pang at that, but it was something I could ignore.

“Let’s go.” Because I want to find out what the hell is up with you, Mr. Laborn. Was he just a control freak, or was there something deeper going on here?