Chapter 51:  Operation:  Caravan

            "So…what exactly is the plan?" Veemon asked.

            "Yeah," Davis agreed.  "You said it's still in America, along with Pixie and Big Blue.  So…when're we supposed to leave with Imperialdramon?"

            "Not just yet," Yolei answered.  "First, we need to get another catch of fish to trade."

            "To trade with who?!" Davis spat.  "Who is there left to trade with, and what would we trade it for?"

            "There are rice patties in the country that some of our seek patrollers have already seen.  It's been a good season for them, what with all this rain we've been getting, and our supplies of rice are almost gone.  And there have got to be some fruit farms in Hawaii, and we'll be able to trade the fish for fruit there.  Hopefully, there will be a few wheat farms in the United States to trade with, too."

            "Huh…so Imperialdramon is gonna carry a big net full of fish to inland Japan and then to Hawaii, and then to Minnesota, and then to Montana?"

            "That's the plan.  But we need to make the fishing trip first, and then we'll need to get a few boxcars to carry the rice and fruit back home in."

            "Huh…this is going to end up being one of the weirdest trips we've ever made!"

            "Amen.  But the fishing trip isn't going to get much easier; this time, we'll be taking six boats instead of just one, like we did the last time."

            "How on Earth will you manage that?  You know how many water menace machines there are!  You could never defend six fishing boats!"

             "I know.  That's why we're getting a little help," Yolei explained.  She looked over Davis's shoulder, and there was an imposing, uniformed man with a military air about him.

            "Who are you?" Davis asked.

            "Admiral Charlie Jameson.  United States Navy."

            "You're…from the navy?!"

            "Commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt."

            "And you're in Japan?"

            "We were on maneuvers in the northwest Pacific at the time the Digiworld was destroyed.  We were told to report to Japan after that, and we were on our way when time was torn apart.  We arrived just yesterday."

            "Then…you're going to be defending the fishing boats?  So…who all is going?"

            "Same Digidestined and trainers as before," Yolei answered.

            "You want me to tell the others?" Davis asked.

            "Go do that."

******

            "I can't believe we're sponsoring a fishing trip---" "First, half the crew gets turned into kids or dies, and now---" "What is the Admiral thinking?!  If we---"

            …Such was the chitchat that was going on in the crew's mess area, where the Digidestined and pokémon trainers had just come to mingle with the crew---and, as it turned out, the Admiral had a great deal more faith in the Digidestined than the crew.

            "So…what's the plan, here?" Tina asked Youngdramon.

            "Beats me.  Doesn't sound like they're too happy to be chaperoning our date with destiny."

            Tina chuckled.  "This mission should turn out to be great.  So…do we pick a table, or scat?"

            "The admiral told us to pick a table.  That's what I think we should do."

            "Okay…" they sat down at one of the tables, and listened to the conversation for a while before joining in for themselves.

            One young man spat, "I can't believe that you're complaining about this!  Okay, I'll admit that half the crew has clothes that won't fit, but some of the people who have been turned into kids still know how to do their jobs!  And some can even do their jobs better as children!"

            "Frankly, I think you don't know what you're talking about, new guy.  Do you have any friends who have been turned into children?  Did the guy who sleeps in the bunk above you turn into a skeleton overnight?"

            He shook his head.  "No.  I haven't been aboard long enough to make any friends."

            "Then you don't know much about how many people are suffering because of this.  Of course we're complaining!"

            "Funny you should say that, Carter," the new guy shot back.  "Correct me if I'm wrong, but you were sixty and just about to retire---not to mention wanting to stay in the navy---and now you're eighteen?"

            "A new lease on life for me, but the new life I have was stolen from someone else!"

            " 'Stolen'?  You're making this sound like a crime!"

            "What would you call the deaths of thousands of people?"

            "You're missing the point!"

            "So are you, new guy.  If this is a blessing in disguise, it's wearing that disguise to avoid getting identified and arrested for murder."

            "Wow...great metaphor!" Youngdramon whispered to herself. "Um, Tina, when do we step in?" Youngdramon asked.

            "I have one idea."  Tina spoke up:  "Know anybody that this time-thing didn't affect?" she asked.

            "Who are you?" Carter asked back.

            "I'm one of the annoying kids that was working with the refugees."

            "…Tell me this:  what does time getting torn apart mean to you?"

            "It means some evil empire is attacking Earth---and the Digiworld."

            "…Where did you get an idea like that?"

            Tina unbuttoned her jacket and said, "Joey?"  Joey's head popped out of her overalls pocket.  Tina heard a few snickers coming from the table.  "Joey, who made time get messed up?"

            "Linonian agazriitato."

            "You're sure?"

            "Yep-yep."

            Tina looked back up at the crew sitting at the table.  "Does this look like any digimon you've ever seen?"

            They shook their heads.

            "Run him through your ship's database:  you won't find him in there.  He's not from Earth or the Digiworld."

            "Then where is he from?"

            "Outer space.  Or so he tells me."

            The people sitting at the table stared at her blankly.

            "What?  What is so unbelievable about Joey being from outer space?"

            "That's not what we don't believe," the new guy answered.  "What we don't believe is that you have an outer space alien living in your overalls pocket."

            "…Oh.  Well…he'll freeze to death if he isn't kept warm.  His home planet must be hotter than Earth."  There was a long, awkward pause.  Tina put Joey back in her pocket and smiled.  "I sure hope that I've made in important contribution to your conversation."

            "Let's do this to another table!" Youngdramon thought aloud.

            A few hours later, they were on the decks of the fishing boats and waiting to leave.  The weather seemed to disagree with the Digidestined:  rain mixed with sleet fell out of a gloomy sky.  It wasn't the worst weather they could leave in, but not the best, either.  There were different teams grouped on the six ships, June and Tina formed a team on one, Kari and Yolei were the second one's team, Ash was on the third, Misty and Cody on the fourth, Michael on the fifth, and Joe on the sixth.  Cody gave the same blessing to the flotilla as he had given to the first fishing trip, and they set out.

            What was strangest to them was that the fishing boats were armed with anti-submarine weapons; armed fishing boats were unheard-of before time had been torn apart.  But now, strangeness had become the norm---not to mention danger.  Crews from the USS T.R. were working the guns, and they were all waiting to hear that the T.R. had picked up something on their radar.

            Cody and Submarimon were already in the water, and their job was to look and see what the radar blips were.  There was no sense in wasting ammo on a shoal of fish.  The first thing they saw was another, short-lived crackone.

            "One down, umpteen thousand to go," Cody thought to himself.

            After a few more minutes…

A voice boomed over the two-way radio, "Cody, we're picking something up on the radar at eleven o'clock!"

            Submarimon squinted to try and see them at a distance.  "Looks like a new type…they're smaller, but there are a lot of them!"

            "What are those things?" Cody asked.

            "I don't know, but they're not friendly!" he answered, dodging a beam of orange energy.

            Cody shouted into his two-way radio, "These are menace machines!  Submarimon and I are taking them!"

            "Be careful down there! " the communications officer answered.

GAZRIITOR:

Nickname: Barnucle (Bānākū)
Real Name: Kullae-tor-azig
Caste: Ro Nut'ka
Modes: One
Special Attacks:
H'vekkota
Comments:
The barnucle is to the water what the luftwaffle is to the air: it is intelligent and fast, and knows how to work with other barnucles to attack. It is covered with sensor apparatus and has a single beam weapon on a corner. A common tactic for the barnucle is to attach itself to the hull of a ship and fire on other targets from there; it is difficult to remove barnucles from the hull without damaging the ship.

            "Oxygen torpedo!"  Submarimon fired a few volleys at the strange, new, tetrahedron-shaped machines.  It didn't take more than two hits to destroy them.

            "We're going to need to report what exactly these things are to Cleaver after this," Cody thought aloud.

            "I agree…uh-oh!  Looks like they're doing their combination thing again!"

            "Kullae-tor-azig, noh kreshnaiona djom…Kullae-tor-gaxurii!"

GAZRIITOR:

Nickname: Tertahedrone (Shitōru)
Real Name: Kullae-tor-gaxurii
Caste: Yon Ro Nut'ka
Modes: One
Special Attacks:
V'ver Ota
Comments:
The tetrahedrone is a combination of five barnucles. The barnucles' ray weapons can fire beams towards each other to amplify firepower. The tetrahedrone is the water's equivalent of the land's queuebe. Its firepower is on par with ultimate digimon, and it will often attack boats, and, on occasion, water digimon. But it will attack not only with its ray weapons, but also by splitting into barnucles and using barnucle's tactics.

            "Oxygen torpedo!"  The torpedoes didn't do much damage to the new machine.

            Cody shouted into his radio, "We need an ultimate down here, right now!"

            "Youngdramon, digivolve to…Ikudramon!"

            "Tibemon, digivolve to…Savamon!"

            "Ikudramon!"

            "Savamon!"

            "DNA digivolve to…Mermon!"  Mermon dove into the water.  "Submarimon, what are these things?"

"More menace machines…I don't know what they're going to try, but my torpedoes won't work on them!  I need to radio-digivolve before I can take them!"

            "Then go and get Misty's water stone!  I'll hold down the fort as long as I can!  Destructor Torpedo!"

            Cody signaled Misty's ship.  "Misty, get your water stone ready:  we're going to need a radio-digivolution, again!"

            "Starmie, go!"  Misty jumped onto Starmie's back and they hovered over the water.  Submarimon surfaced, and Misty bent over and tapped him with the water stone…

            "Submarimon, radio-digivolve to…Kurodadumon, the unquestionably reliable guardian of the sea!"  Kurodadumon dove into the water again and face the incoming swarm of tetrahedrones.  "Oxygen Torpedo Volley!" he shouted, firing a spread of torpedoes at the incoming drones.  The individual torpedoes did no more damage than they had before he'd digivolved, but there were more of them than before, so a few tetrahedrones died.

            "There are just too many of these!  We could use some more support!" Mermon shouted.

            "V'ver Ota!" one of the tetrahedrones shouted.  Out from one of the points of the tetrahedrone flew a red laser beam.  Mermon reflected it away with her axe.

            "They're getting angry!  Some help would be good!" Cody yelled into the radio.

            "Coming right up!"

            Cody heard an odd noise, and suddenly saw several long, narrow streaks come flying down from the surface.  Those had to have been bullets, since he saw sparks come flying off the armor plating of the tetrahedrones.  But the bullets did no good; the tetrahedrones' armor was too strong.

            "Not working!" Cody shouted.  "Bullets won't help against these things; we need armor-piercing weapons!"

            "We'll have them there in thirty seconds!"

            "That might not be soon enough!" Cody yelled back.  Already, one of the tetrahedrones had circled around them and split into five barnucles.  The barnucles attached themselves to one of the ship's hulls, and each barnucle on the ship's bottom began taking pot shots at Mermon and Kurodadumon.  "H'vekkota!" they shouted as they fired orange laser bolts at the two ultimates.

            "We have a situation!" Cody shouted.  "Five of the new machines have attached themselves to ship #3!"

            "What do you mean, 'attached'?"

            "I mean that they're clinging onto the hull somehow, and they're shooting at us from there!"

            "Are they trying to damage the ship?"

            "No, but they're trying to damage us!"

            "...And you can't shoot them, because blowing them up would damage the boat..."

            "That's a pretty big problem…where are those armor-piercing weapons?"

            "They should be arriving any second now!"

            Before Cody could answer, several air-to-water missiles went flying down form the surface and incinerated the rest of the tetrahedrones.  Unfortunately, the barnucles on the boat's hull still had to be dealt with…

            "So…how do we handle these?" Mermon asked, reflecting a shot away from herself.

            "My first guess is we cut them off!  Kuro Claw!"  Kurodadumon clamped his huge claw down on one barnucle and pierced the armor.  The barnucle died quickly, leaving its wreckage on the boat's hull.

            "Good guess!" Mermon agreed.  "Mer poleax!"   The other four tetrahedrones were also turned into scrap iron.

            Tina leaned over the side rail of her boat.  "You know, I'm really getting sick of this!  I have no idea what Mermon is doing, down there!"

            "Ditto," June agreed.  "It's freezing out here!"

            "The weather is the least of our worries, June, what with robots trying to latch on to our hulls and kill us!"

            "I hope one of them uses a fire attack and thaws me out!"

            "Oh, c'mon, June!  It's not that cold out."

            "But it is cold!  It's cold enough that---"

            An underwater explosion showered June and Tina with icy water.  "What was that one?" Tina asked.  She shouted up to the military personnel working the ship's cannon, "Did we get him?"

            There was no answer; the soldiers were too busy working the weapon to answer.

            Tina sighed.  "That's what I hate about this:  they never tell us anything about what's going on!"

            "I guess they figure we can't do anything, anyway---and that's how I feel, right about now!" June mewed, brushing the freezing water off her rainsuit.  "I'm going to turn in to an ice cube!"

            "Why don't you just go inside the cabin?" Tina asked.  "It's not like we'll need you to armor-digivolve Mermon, or anything like that…"

            "Thanks…I sure hope they have something warm to drink in there."

            Below the surface, that battle raged on.  Some dra-guns were beginning to make their presence felt.  They fired volleys of shots up at one of the fishing boats, trying to pierce its hull.  Mermon and Kurodadumon got in the way of the shots and tried to reflect as many as they could away, but they couldn't keep all of them away.

            "Uh…Kurodadumon, does it seem a little unsettling that there are bubbles coming out of that hole in the boat's hull?"

            "Maybe a little," he answered.

            Cody shouted into his two-way radio, "One of the boats has been hit and is taking in water!"

            "Which one?"

            "It's boat number…one, I think!"

            "You think?!"

            "Whichever boat Tina was assigned to!"