AN: I'm back! At long last I've started to get my shit in order. Quick recap, Noelle is loose in the remains of Coil's base and is making copies of the few people who survived the Crawler attack. The heroes and villains currently have their powers neutralized. The Nine's roster at the moment: Jack Slash, Shatterbird, Bonesaw, Burnscar, Crawler, Mannequin. For the sake of my sanity Hatchet Face was killed in such a way that Bonesaw could not reanimate him and Cherish did not join the nine. This was enough of a headache without a reanimated corpse and an empathic emotion manipulator on that level added to the equation. The Siberian was killed near the beginning of the fic.

Thanks go out to Rajvic_wolfboy for both betaing this and for supplying me with a suitable frankengun… er that is, a lesser known gun that combines some aesthetics and performance qualities from other firearms. Link: . ?fuseaction= &category_ID=558

I do not own Worm or the Chronicles of the Black Company.

Company Girl 2.8

Owl

Thirty men and two capes seem like crap odds to be taking against an A, borderline S, class threat. But it was all hands-on deck to deal with the nine already and this little speed bump needed to be dealt with before it got out of control. Besides, Rose could likely handle this one on her own if not for the clones. The rest of us were just here for target practice and backup.

I double checked my Sig P226. The .40 caliber handgun is the go to side arm for the Company and a personal favorite of mine. The large caliber round had excellent stopping power. Satisfied, I slid it back in place on my right thigh, before examining the edge on my combat knife. The knife is a simple ka-bar design, single edge, slight curve near the point, ergonomic grip, and a small guard at the base of the blade. Simplicity itself, but highly effective. Finding no nicks, the blade went back to its normal place on my left hip.

The green and black glow of my power danced from my back around my left side to reform in my hands. The Company standard LAR-47 assault rifle; rugged, accurate at seven hundred fifty meters, and used 7.62 x 39 ammo. I left Lady's laser attachment clipped to my vest. I liked the laser well enough, but if I needed to change weapons with my power it would be left behind, and I didn't need to deal with tripping over it in the middle of a fight. Without a better idea of what to expect I wasn't about to risk compromising my powers flexibility. The extra firepower just wasn't worth it when I could simply make a grenade launcher instead.

Glancing around the Carpet I took in the others going through their own little rituals.

I hated this. Not that we were walking into a fight with minimal intelligence, well, no more than I usually hated that. It happens sometimes. You just had to stay on your toes and make the best of it. Having only thirty men against a cape who cloned people and was herself, in the words of One-Eye, 'the bastard love child of a bull elephant and a Lovecraftian horror' was frustrating and worrying, but we could handle it. We had handled worse with less considering Rose and I were both here.

No, what bothered me was that we were here at all, and not with the rest of the Company. That we would only have thirty minutes to touchdown, deal with the threat, and regroup with the others before hitting the Nine. If this dragged out they would be going in without us.

We were going to lose people. Even if blanketing the city worked exactly as intended, which it wouldn't, we would still lose people. The Nine were just that good at killing. Being there would mean I could make a difference, not being there meant I couldn't. And good as our plan was it had holes in it. Not the least of which was that we were going to be bluffing our asses off with the locals to keep them from calling in more capes who would only get in our way.

The Protectorate always thought sending in more capes would help, but they were idiots. They spent years, sometimes even decades, training not to kill. They can't just shut that off at the drop of a hat. They hesitate, pull punches, run in ignoring the plan and they get themselves, and more importantly our people, killed.

So, we needed them to stay out of the way. If they thought capes would just end up powerless they wouldn't send them here at all. Hopefully.

The plan was to bluff. Most of what we would be dropping from the Carpets was plainsmoke. Lady may have found a way to preserve the powder Rose made, but that alone had taken five years. In the three years since Rose had spent at least a little time every day squirreling away the powder. Unfortunately, even with Lady's tech it still had a shelf life, and we had tapped into the reserves more than once for particularly nasty capes, or groups of capes. Lord knows we had been liberal with the stuff when dealing with the Butcher.

Every squad was carrying at least a few smoke grenades filled with the dust Rose created tonight, and that had eaten through the reserve stock, but to add onto that knocking out most of the cities capes at the neutral meeting. We only had enough to hit the area directly around where we knew the Nine were holed up. A block at most. We couldn't afford to waste under normal circumstances, but especially not now.

On top of that there was no way that Bonesaw would neglect to fit the Nine with some kind of breathing filter. Oh, the powder would still work, but not as well, not as quickly. It would have to seep in through the skin, and through the tissue of the mouth and nose. That would still work, but more slowly, and possibly not as completely. It might only weaken powers or neutralize only certain aspects of them instead of shutting them down outright, or it might just take longer to fully affect them. It would be impossible to predict. The Nine were hard enough to predict already, this would only make things worse.

I checked myself over to make sure my gloves and helmet left no exposed skin. It was a must, given how much of Rose's power would likely be thrown around tonight. The fabric of my uniform would still be coated with the stuff though so I'd probably start to feel the effects within a couple of hours depending on how much I got exposed to. It would have to be enough though. If we hadn't won in that amount of time we would be dead or retreating anyway.

The Carpet touched down silently and as one we disembarked, everyone's movements precise and silent. We drilled this until disembarking is as easy as breathing, and it shows.

I fell into formation behind Little Prick, and Chicago. Close enough to the front that I can provide extra firepower immediately if needed, but not taking point. Rarely if ever does the Captain allow a cape to take point. Especially on an op like this where point means becoming the first target. We're not to be risked like that. I hated it, but protocol is protocol, and more than once having the cape hanging back, even just a bit, has made all the difference and gotten a squad out of an ambush or kill zone. I knew that, the men knew that.

It still didn't make me feel like any less of a coward for never taking point.

Little Prick is a big man standing over six foot and built like an old roman statue made from black marble. I've always wondered if the man's name was supposed to be ironic or literal. I'd never asked though. Asking would give the impression I was interested, which would mean dealing with Little Prick's lousy pickup lines, and Raven's mother hening. Besides which I had a suspicion he got the name for his tendency to act like a prick from time to time. His attitude left a lot to be desired some days.

Chicago by contrast is a quiet, pale, five foot six, with serious anger issues. How those two got along as well as they did confused a lot of people. How Chicago got his name confused everyone more seeing as he had a Cajun drawl, and had joined the Company when we had been in Tallahassee. A lot of people had been drunk when that came about, but no one seemed to know who was actually to blame.

The base entrance was disguised as a generic looking warehouse. Though between water damage from the recent attack, and the fact that the loading bay style doors had been ripped out, presumably by Crawler, it looked considerably worse for wear.

Little Prick and Chicago took positions on either side of the opening. On Prick's signal, they leaned around the corner rifles raised. Immediately gunfire broke the silence of the night.

"Clear!" The pair hauled themselves up the slight ledge and took defensive positions as the rest of us followed. Inside were a pair of bodies. Obviously, the clones we had been briefed about considering one was naked and had a decidedly ken doll look to him given what he was missing. The second was missing an arm and wore only a bulletproof vest. Both clones had guns in hand.

Wonderful. The things were scrounging weapons from the best armed group in the city, excluding ourselves.

Prick and Chicago moved quickly and smoothly out of the loading bay towards what had once been a set of double doors before Crawler had invited himself in. Now it was more of a vaguely rectangular hole. It led to a hallway that descended at a slight angle. Everything was lit by the dull red glow of emergency lighting, and the coppery smell of blood mixed with the less powerful smell of the dead's last bowel movements filled the air. Thankfully the smell of rot and decay had yet to take hold.

A burst of poorly aimed gunfire had both men cursing as they dropped to the floor. The rest of us dropped into crouches.

"I'm hit!" Prick called back. "Not bad, just a-son of a bitch!" he cursed as a purple beam of light flashed through the opening only a foot above his head. The smell of ozone briefly assaulted my nose.

I didn't think any of Lady's older model lasers would still be kicking around the black market. Then again there had been most of army's worth of the things. Still, after eight years? Coil must have had really good connections.

Crouched down low, I spared a glance at the men behind me before signaling to Raven who had pulled up beside me. I flashed through a couple of hand signs and the man I considered a second father nodded back. Right now, the name of the game was stalling. We needed them focused on us. Chipping down their numbers wouldn't hurt either.

On a three count, a pair of grenades sailed over Prick and Chicago, clattering to the floor below.

The explosion that followed and the angered bellow of something that didn't sound quite human drew a dark smile across my lips and set a fresh burst of adrenaline through me.

Then things went wrong.

Little Prick's prone form was replaced with a man, a clone. It stood on disproportionate legs; one at least six inches longer than the other and overly muscled. The thing shouted something about not harming 'the mistress' and held its arms out to the side before slightly opening its hands.

The pins popping out of the grenades arced through the air reflecting the dull red of the emergency lights. Time seemed to slow down even as I shouted. "Grenade!"

Then someone blurred past me and tackled the clone back over the ledge. I could see it all in perfect clarity for one short moment. The uniform gave nothing away, it was standard. The corporal stripes narrowed things down a bit, but the true identifier was the knife. A Fairbairn Sykes, with a sheath made to look like an opened bird's beak. The one showy piece of equipment the man owned. I'd know it anywhere. I bought it for him.

"Raven!"

The explosion shook the floor and prompted more screams and roars from a basement.

The fucking ckots would pay for that.

"Rose, get your ass in gear! The vase are picking us off!" I don't bother waiting for an answer that wouldn't be coming from my mute friend.

I needed something big.

My rifle flickered. It only took a second for me to be on my feet with my finger on the trigger. Bolted to the floor in front of me was a fifty-cal. machine gun with an inch and a half of iron plating on either side of the barrel with only a thin vertical strip of empty space for me to see through. And from where I was standing most of the lower floor was a killing field.

The helmet dampens the worst of the sound, but the near manic rhythm of the machine gun fire rocked my arms even with the mount taking the brunt of the recoil. I tracked a line of fire across the clones one after another. Scavenged rifles or not, the things were not trained soldiers and did not respond quickly enough to do more than scuff the armor a few times. They dropped like flies, and then I focused fire on the main target.

One-Eye described her pretty well. Though I might have tacked centaur onto his description, given the way the girl's torso jutted out of the monstrosity. She shrieked and shouted and flailed about, but even blowing her brains out of the back of her head did not seem to do anything permanent to her.

I swapped guns moving forward so some of the boys could join me in a proper firing line. Most of the heavier explosives were out of the question. Maybe something a little less conventional. With a flicker of thought an AK-47 is in my hands. Only the ammo is a little unusual.

The screams the bitch made as the incendiaries ripped into her and kept burning were music to my ears, but she regenerated too fast for it to really matter. Like bee stings against a bear. The other two beside me had given up on conventional ammo and were using their lasers. The red bolts of light did noticeably more damage causing the things flesh to slough off like molten wax, but even burning through half a foot of flesh it didn't add up fast enough to mean anything against something so large with such rapid regeneration.

With a barked order over my shoulder three smoke grenades clattered to the floor below us. For a brief moment before the white smoke became too thick I could see some of the monster's flesh sloughing off. Apparently Rose's power is especially effective.

The things scream is beautiful. My answering grin was perhaps a bit unhinged.

For the next few minutes nothing could be seen, and the only sounds where the beast's bellows and the soggy thumps of chunks of semi hardened flesh falling onto cement.

Then the smoke started to clear.

"Noelle!" The scream was male and full of fear.

I stumbled suddenly and found myself looking up at the still screaming thing. It's body was flaking apart and thrashing violently, but Rose's power was clearly working more slowly than at first as the smoke started to dissipate.

There were several bursts of gunfire from behind me and a few shouts of my name. I ignored all of that to focus on the monster in front of me, who had finally noticed my presence.

Its roar was rage, and hate, and pain.

I widened my stance and braced for the sudden increase in weight as my power shifted. Even prepared I nearly stumbled under the weight that settled across my back. I didn't hesitate to pull the trigger.

A burst of flame shot out of the nozzle like dragon fire of myth as I took measured steps back. It screamed in agony.

The thing tried to rear back and throw itself away from the fire, but the powder in the smoke grenades had done its job very well on its flank. The rear legs rotted away to almost nothing. It stumbled and tried to drag itself away from me with only it's damaged front legs. I kept up the pressure, sweeping the stream of fire back and forth across its twisted body.

I was not alone either. The bright red streaks of Lady's lasers streamed down on the thing. Even through the helmets filters I could smell the burning flesh like so many pigs barbecuing.

The flame sputtered out after just a few seconds. Part of the reason these weren't used anymore was the fuel restrictions. Luckily those didn't apply to me. My power flickered, and I pulled the trigger again.

For a time, the whole world boiled down to just lasers and flame and screams of pain. Then a small boom from off to my left signaled the arrival of Lady and her squad. Breaching through another entrance on the lower level. The volume of laser fire more than doubled and the air became clouded as Rose flooded the place with her power.

Quickly the things roars got weaker, and the laser fire trickled off. Finally, I was the only one still attacking. I burned the whole corpse to ash and let the tanks run dry a few times before I finally stopped.

The silence that followed the roar of my flamethrower was oppressive. The silence after a battle always was. It was that moment in which the adrenaline started to bleed off and reality started to catch up and you had to ask the question. 'Who hadn't made it?' But I already knew. Raven hadn't made it. Couldn't have made it. No matter how good our body armor might be, two grenades at point blank range was a death sentence. And the bastard had done it to save me.

I shook my head. Later. There would be time later. There were still the Nine to deal with. "Grab ours and put them upstairs in the loading dock. We'll be back for them once we finish this."

A few of the men got to work. Rose walked up and squeezed my shoulder, but I brushed her off. Now wasn't the time. Later. I would deal with it later. Right now, I just wanted, just needed, another target to shoot.