Chapter 19

Abe-1 jogged up to the beach and up to the edge of the water, then paused and looked out at the bay.

Since he'd parachuted from his shot-up Komet and had that brief fight with some gang goons, he'd had a nice brisk, jog for several miles unmolested.

Being heavily armed, and obviously so, had probably been a factor in his not being bothered by anyone.

Nobody wanted to borrow trouble: if the heavily-armed man was content to keep on jogging and just go away, most folks - except government types, usually - were content to let him go without bothering him.

And he hadn't run into any government types. Apparently they'd had other things to do.

Jogging with the heavy backpack had been a bit like old times in the marines, though they'd never had him wear a backpack full of explosives - mostly an assortment of pistol-launched grenades in this case, but also a couple of panzerfausts.

He was still feeling pretty gung-ho, and pondered, for a moment, swimming out to the battleship, before deciding that was too much. It was already 3 miles from shore and the backpack would complicate things.

Besides, the ship was headed away from shore as fast as it could sail.

The original Abe knew it the moment Abe-1 decided not to swim, and arranged a teleport portal to open next to Abe-1.

As he stepped through, Abe-1 thought, "this has been invigorating! Perhaps, soon, I should go hunt wild boar with a spear, or something like that."

-0-0-0-

HMS Agamemnon headed out to sea, away from the crazy inhabitants of Brockton Bay, at her top speed - her top sailing speed, which was 62.5 mph, while her crew took care of various tasks.

The repaired Teleportation Console was busy, first with sending all the former prostitutes wherever they wanted to go, then with sending most of the crew down to a couple of uninhabited Virgin Islands for 2-day vacations.

They sent off the vacationers with all sorts of Replicated gear, from vehicles like houseboats, jetskis, seaplanes, speedboats, and RV's - Boz had worked for Winnebago one summer and had taken along a remote unit from the Replicator to scan everything on the lot, including a couple custom RV's being overhauled for celebrities - to personal gear like scuba equipment, skydiving equipment, camping equipment and various entertainments.

It was supposed to be a vacation after all, and the more luxurious it was, the better.

He also sent over a hundred general purpose robots, both to do miscellaneous chores for the vacationers, and to keep down any aggressive wildlife there may be.

Then, when Dinah told him some local capes could teleport, he sent along a dozen combat robots too, just in case.

They were still sending things through the teleporter when the ship got to what Boz felt may be a safe distance from Brockton Bay - 30 miles out to sea - and then 'hid' by submerging like a submarine.

Boz didn't want to get bothered by the locals any more, but also didn't want to be too far away when it came time, 2 days from now, to receive the 3 train-cars full of food, and then leave this dimension.

And in the meantime, he had things to do.

He started by finishing the salvage job on the truck.

It was pretty thoroughly shot-up, so most of what they'd loaded into it was damaged.

He had already salvaged the cash boxes and sent the cash that remained usable with the former sex-slaves as each had left. It had been about a thousand local dollars each - enough to get them started in their new lives, even without the chocolates and spices they'd sent them with.

He'd also pulled out a number of usable pistols and sent them along too - some girls had taken one, some two.

Boz had been hoping to find some unusual weapons he could scan into the Replicator - things he didn't already have in there.

But the gang had not had a large variety of weapons there at the brothel-hotel. The collection had only included 6 new things Boz didn't already have, and none of them were in completely new categories like what Abe-1 had brought back - just a couple new varieties each of rifle and pistol, a new machine-gun and a new flame-thrower.

Boz and his buddies had an appointment to try out all the new stuff tomorrow, on some target boats they would Replicate.

The chemistry lab that had apparently been Bakuda's bomb-making lab, was too shot-up to be any use at all.

But the two safe's were effectively undamaged. He could get them open in seconds with particle beams, lasers or a variety of other ways that were all too damaging to spare the contents of the safe.

Opening the safes in a way that would spare their contents would take a while.

They got the safes out of the truck, and then dismissed the shot-up truck hulk.

Then they moved the safes to a workshop, scanned them using a remote unit from the Replicator, and got some repair robots working on them with angle-grinders sporting large metal-cutting abrasive discs. But that would take hours or days.

Once they had them open, they may be able to determine the combinations they were set to, by examining their inner workings. If they could, then they'd be able to Replicate usable safes. And if they couldn't, no problem, the Replicator had lots of memory, and the safes could always be deleted from it if they ever ran low.

Boz, tired and dirty, walked through the command center on his way to go take a shower and suddenly remembered something.

He face-palmed and exclaimed "I promised that local girl, Lisa, we would monitor her meeting with Coil. That was supposed to happen hours ago."

"We did monitor that meeting, and it's all recorded on tape for you to look at when convenient," Beth calmly answered from where she sat at the Communications Console.

"Thanks tons! You are awesome. I can't believe I forgot. Did we learn anything interesting?" Boz asked.

Beth started playing a recording on the main screen, and continued talking while it played.

It showed Lisa, as seen by the ship's visual sensors re-directed through ESP so it looked like the sensor was just a couple feet above Lisa's head and following along as she walked.

While Lisa walked in the recording, Beth said "We learned a lot, a little, and almost nothing."

Lisa walked down into a parking structure, through a hidden door, then past 3 checkpoints and down a hall, until she got to an office with a masked man in it, seated behind a desk.

Beth said, "we learned a lot about his main secret base - its location, who and what he has there, and interesting tidbits like the fact that he has it all wired for self-destruction at need."

The recording showed Lisa talking with the masked man behind the desk.

"We have an audio recording too. I'll play that back for you in a moment. We also scanned the place looking for metals, energy transmission such as electrical currents, and chemical sensors - that's how we found the self-destruction charges."

"Great job," Boz congratulated.

Beth continued, "we learned a little about Coil's super-power, but almost nothing about what other resources Coil has in other locations."

"Good point," Boz agreed, "a man paranoid enough to rig his main base to self-destruct is going to have off-site resources he can call on at need, and we'd be foolish to move against him before we know more about what he can do when pushed. What did you learn about his super-power?"

"Lisa said he claimed it is probability control. It isn't. I tested that. At one point, Coil reached for a pen from a cup of pens there on his desk. In any bunch of pens like that, there are always a couple that have dried up and gone dead. So I used the Probability Control Console to give him bad luck. He picked up, tried, and discarded 5 dead pens in a row. If he had had probability control super-powers, then he'd likely have used it after picking the first dead pen, so as not to pick another."

"Good idea!" Boz enthused.

"Thanks. I double-checked by using the Determine Destiny Console to make him lose his keys and drop his coffee mug. He struggled through those like any of the rest of us would have. He does Not have probability control super-powers."

"Well done! Did you learn anything else?" Boz asked.

"A little. While watching Coil with the Detect Mind Console, trying to learn something about his emotions, I saw something I've only ever seen when watching someone use our Duplication Console - his mind split into two copies. One of those copies went away almost immediately - I don't know where. With our Duplicates, you can watch the Duplicate minds walk along wherever they are going. But Coil's Duplicate mind went totally away as if it teleported or was dismissed."

"That could be bad," Boz worried, "a teleporting Duplicate would make it really hard to move against him and be sure we got him."

"I don't think it's a full Duplicate - the visual scanners saw only Coil - no Duplicate. In fact, whatever he did, he did twice during Lisa's visit, and Lisa was there with him. I asked Lisa about it and she said she saw nothing unusual. She also said she's never seen any evidence of Coil being in 2 places at once, or any of the other indications he may have a Duplicate. And she's certain he can not teleport."

"You already spoke to Lisa? Thanks! I wasn't looking forward to that. She's...a handful."

"Yep. She said you're afraid of her - and afraid of me too," Beth rep-lied, "Don't be. I don't bite."

"That, right there, is exactly what I mean: she has a special way of making ordinary things difficult!" Basil complained. "But back to the point: we could move against Coil, but don't know what the result would be - we're ignorant of his abilities. And we promised to move against him in exchange for the help Lisa already gave us. So when ignorance is a problem, fix the ignorance. Let's watch him continuously until we learn more, 24 hours a day, with all the sensors that seem relevant. It won't be any fun maintaining that watch, so I and my Duplicates will do it - I wouldn't ask anyone else to."

Beth grinned, "too late. Lisa already suggested that, and I already worked out the shifts with volunteers from my Astronomy Club. We only have to watch until tomorrow afternoon anyway. Lisa meets with Coil again then and said we have to do what we can before that meeting, since she has inside information saying there is at least a 50% chance that Coil is planning to torture her then."

"OK, that's her call then," Captain Basil decided.

-0-0-0-

Boz participated in watching Coil for one shift, while also working on another project.

He made a Duplicate of himself and a Replica of a utility helicopter: a simple Bell UH-1 - a type commonly nicknamed Huey. He chose one without the rocket pods, machine-guns, mini-guns or grenade launcher options, since he wanted as simple an option as possible. He'd read up on how to fly a helicopter, but had never tried it before.

Then he had the battleship surface - it had been set up by his grandfather to have no problem submerging, but that was not so with the helicopter.

Then his Duplicate, Bas-Oon got in the Huey, and tried flying it.

Luckily the battleship was built tough, so the wreckage crashing down onto it didn't hurt it at all.

Nor did the next failed attempt, nor the next.

Boz wouldn't have been much use by himself as far as keeping a continuous watch on Coil, since he was constantly making brief trips out to make new Duplicates and Replicas.

Half an hour, and a few crashes, later, another Replica Huey appeared - on the rear deck, well away from where Boz was practicing on the front of the ship. Abe-1 came out and was soon practicing helicopter flight like Bas-Oon

And, like Bas-Oon, Abe-1 crashed a lot at first.

Soon they figured out a way to simplify things, by skipping takeoffs and landings to just concentrate on simply flying around. They did that by using telekinesis from the ship, or from a couple repair robots using their telekinesis cooperatively, to get the Huey's up off the deck and well into the air, or back down again.

With that change, they were able to focus on fewer things at once, and basic competence at just flying around in open air soon followed.

Then, with the basics of helicopter flight comfortably familiar to them, and thus no longer taking so much attention, they were able to explore, bit by bit, things like hovering.

Bas-Oon had just had his first successful landing - right after Abe-1's second successful landing - when Beth contacted both of them.

Speaking directly into their inner-ears via the Communication Console, she said, "you're going to want to come see this."

-0-0-0-

-about 30 minutes earlier-

Lung hated this stupid island.

He hated it intensely.

He hated the stupid trees on it.

He hated the stupid bushes, the stupid dirt, and the stupid rocks.

He hated that it was an island.

And he really hated that there was nobody here but him - no people, not even any animals.

There were no people, and no signs that there had ever been any people.

There wasn't even any trash, and people leave some of that behind everywhere they go.

Most especially Lung hated that, here, there was nobody to fight.

That absolutely enraged him. But it was fruitless rage - it did not serve to activate his super-power. That needed rage, yes, but it also needed conflict of some type, and outright combat was best.

Without somebody to fight, Lung was effectively without super-powers.

He hated that.

And he hated the thought that it was going to stay that way.

But there was no indication of any way to change it.

When he'd arrived, his super-power had been highly ramped-up: he'd been very scaly and dragon-like, including having working wings, as well as being wreathed in fire and able to breathe out blasts of fire.

He'd been eagerly pursuing those maddeningly hard to kill Colombian drug lords, who had gone out onto the bay where there was no place to hide.

Lung had been flying after them, full of glee at the thought of finally getting his claws into them and tearing them, and their vehicles, apart.

Then his vision had been obscured, and he'd been yanked hard upwards. Then upwards had somehow become downwards and he'd been yanked that way even harder.

Then he'd been here - flying a thousand feet above an island somewhere which he did not recognize.

He'd been able to see clearly, from one end of the island to the other. It was about 10 miles long and 5 miles wide.

There were no buildings or any other sign of people.

More especially, there were no boats anywhere, nor any docks, wharves, airports, or any other way to get off the island.

He was here alone.

His fight being effectively over, his super-powers had begun 'winding down' and relaxing.

Lung didn't usually think very clearly when ramped-up: rage was like that. It clouded the mind by focusing all attention on itself.

But this time he had managed to descend while he still had functioning wings.

Soon after that, Lung landed in a field of big ferns on the central ridge of the island.

Finding nothing of interest there, he'd hiked down to the highlands, and commenced fighting his way through thickets of dwarf trees there.

He had hopes that would get his super-power going again, but it didn't.

So he wasn't sure what to do now. He'd seen the lower elevations and they'd looked pretty dry. So he didn't see much point in going there.

But he didn't see much point in anything else either.

He had no skills for living off the land, building log cabins and such things - he certainly was no Robinson Crusoe.

So he was standing idle next to a fig tree, which he had been lucky to recognize, since he had never been much interested in plants.

He wasn't hungry, so he was doing the one thing he could think of - swearing.

He'd been at that for quite a while when an amazing thing happened.

In thin air, a door formed and then opened. It was just a few feet in front of him, though about ten feet in the air so he couldn't reach it.

Through it, he could see the ceiling of what looked like an office building, complete with fluorescent lights.

Through it, he also heard a voice offering "we'll free you and put you back in Brockton Bay, if you'll do us 3 favors, to be repaid later when we call for them."

Lung accepted immediately.

The door then slid through the air, down to ground level, allowing him to step through, which he did, finding himself immediately in an air-conditioned conference room, decorated all in white, in what appeared to be a standard office building.

Currently sharing the room with Lung, there were 4 people, seated in white leather chairs around the white marble conference table.

An ordinary-looking black woman with long hair, dressed as a doctor, was clearly in charge.

Seated to her right was a bland, bookish, middle-aged man, in a suit with a pocket protector.

The other two were seated to their leader's left.

First, a pale-skinned plain looking and thin young man with a blank and unfocused gaze.

Lastly, a pale 20-something young man whose eyes had been burned out and now looked like twin ash-trays.

The bookish man spoke. "Hello, I'm Number-Man, we've been doing business together, though we haven't met: I control your financial accounts. This is Doctor Mother," he gestured to the black woman, "and to her left are DoorMaker and Clairvoyant."

Lung recognized the voice of Number-Man from their many phone conversations about business in the past. Number-Man did indeed manage several special bank accounts for Lung and his ABB gang.

Many villains used Number-Man's service for such things. He did a good job. He didn't embezzle. The accounts always made money, via interest or other means. Number-Man was a positive wizard at money-laundering, and he never asked where the money came from.

Lung nodded to Number-man by way of greeting.

Their leader, the doctor, took over. As she spoke, Lung realized she had been the voice he'd heard through the door, offering him rescue.

She said, "you now owe us 3 favors for saving you from the island. If anyone here calls on you for a favor, you will do as they request. If you wish to renege on the deal, we can put you back just as easily as we rescued you."

Lung fought down his default reaction - rage and combat. He hated being told what to do.

But in a rare moment of clarity, he realized that they could do as they said, and dump him back on that island.

He was tempted to try his luck with combat anyway - he would very much enjoy defeating, then dominating, and controlling such a group as this.

But his rare moment of clarity wasn't over yet, and he realized that they'd be prepared for that kind of thing, and he'd find himself back on that island.

He was no wilderness-survival expert, and starvation was one thing he could not regenerate from.

He couldn't make himself act subservient, but he managed to nod his agreement to the deal.

Doctor Mother replied "very well, now go." and gestured to DoorMaker, who opened another mystical door - some kind of teleportation gate - from the conference room to Lung's empty bedroom in Brockton Bay.

Lung practically leaped through the door into his room.

The door winked out a few seconds later.

Lung looked out the window to prove to himself that he was back in Brockton Bay.

When he saw that he was indeed back, his first thought was of all the people around here he wanted to get even with, especially that newcomer-group of Colombian drug lords.

Lung grinned in anticipation, and yelled for his lieutenants to gather the gang.

A few minutes later he was no longer grinning.

Sitting in his office with one of his lieutenants - the only one who had shown up in answer to Lung's summons - Lung was furious at the news he'd just heard.

His gang had fallen apart in his absence.

It wasn't right.

Sure they'd taken a lot of damage from those tanks and robots and things.

Sure they'd lost Oni-Lee, and Lung and Bakuda had disappeared, so they'd had no capes left.

And OK, they'd been under attack by the Empire gang, including several of their capes, ever since Lung disappeared.

But that was no excuse - they should have fought!

Instead his gang members had mostly grabbed what they could and had fled. They'd taken weapons, equipment, vehicles, and every penny they could find of his ready-cash.

The only money Lung had left was in the various special bank accounts managed by Number-Man. Luckily, there was quite a bit in there.

With money and his own awesome fighting powers, Lung could rebuild his gang.

He faced the lieutenant and yelled "go gather the gang - all you can at least. We're counter-attacking the Empire immediately!"

The man ran out and lung frowned, wondering if he'd only still been here to do some looting himself.

Well, he'd look into that later.

There was a small rush of air and a mystical door opened in mid-air.

Bakuda stepped through, with a coconut in her hand.

Lung thought he recognized a certain conference room on the other side of the door, behind her.

Lung asked her "3 favors?"

She nodded, "Yes, I now owe them 3 favors for saving me from an empty island. I said 'Thank You' to them, and they said they didn't do it for my thanks, but to build up the power of their organization, and that I may not like some of what they ask me to do. I'm not sure how to take that, but at least I'm off that island."

Lung pointed, "What's the coconut for?"

She held it higher, showing it had been cracked open and contained some yellow rocks, "I found some natural sulfur, and some other chemicals, and was working on making it into a bomb."

"Good focus. Hang on to that idea and get down to your spare lab downstairs. We need more bombs right away - we're going to war with the Empire!"

-0-0-0-

The main screen in the command center of the battleship HMS Agamemnon showed a scene of battle.

It showed Lung - his power already ramped-up enough to make him scaly and wreathed in flames - finishing off the last of a group of regular gang toughs.

Then Lung, wasting no time, charged down an alley and right at a pair of Empire capes in the street beyond, there to direct and support Empire troops in their takeover of ABB gang territory.

Several such groups, consisting of regular gang members supported by a couple capes, were actively invading ABB territory simultaneously, and Lung had chosen to go after this one first, because it contained Kaiser - the Empire gangs leader.

Lung charged straight at Kaiser, as fast as he could go.

Kaiser's super-power was to create metal. He usually used it to create spikes and walls in combat. Preparatory to combat, Kaiser always used his power to create full articulated plate armor from head to toe for himself. That was his cape costume, but also had a lot of practical protective value.

As Lung charged, Kaiser noticed him and started creating spikes and blades in Lung's path.

Lung ran on anyway. As he ran, his feet and lower legs got shredded by all the spikes and blades he encountered.

Lung ran on simply trusting that his regeneration would fix the damage sooner or later.

He focused solely on Kaiser, to make sure to be ready to stop any attempt to escape, and consequently paid no attention at all to the spikes and blades gashing him with every step.

Kaiser readied his sword to meet Lung's charge, and appeared to wait, while actually busying himself making more spikes and other metal objects.

So it was that when Lung - currently 8 feet tall and very dragon-like - reached a distance of about 8 and a half feet short of Kaiser, metal bear-traps snapped closed on each of Lung's ankles.

These bear-traps were effectively immovable - firmly chained to spikes that penetrated several feet underground. So when the traps snapped shut, Lung fell his full length, face-first onto pavement that had been thickly covered in foot-long spikes.

Every part of Lung was impaled on these spikes, and for a moment they held him completely immobile.

Foolishly, Kaiser took that moment to brag and posture, rather than trying to behead Lung with his sword. Mere beheading wouldn't stop Lung, but it would take a while to regenerate from it, and during that time Kaiser and the others with him could have either tried to find a way to keep Lung down, or could have made their getaway.

But, before Kaiser was done boasting, Lung managed to rip one of his arms off of the spikes impaling it, and bash Kaiser hard in the chest. Lung's claws did not penetrate Kaiser's metal breastplate, but Lung's strength did cave in the breastplate by a couple inches, while throwing Kaiser backwards and into a wall.

Kaiser slumped down unconscious and having trouble breathing.

Lung pulled himself off his de-facto bed of spikes, then, as he stood to go finish Kaiser, Rune arrived.

Rune arrived in her usual way - standing on top of a flying section of sidewalk she had ripped free and levitated using her telekinesis. Alongside her was another large, multi-ton section of concrete which she must have torn from a multi-level parking garage.

Rune stopped her own concrete 'flying carpet' next to Kaiser, so she could render him aid.

But she kept a second, larger and heavier, piece of flying concrete moving, and directed it to slam into Lung, knocking him down to land face-first on the bed of spikes he had just vacated.

Then she dropped the chunk of concrete onto Lung's back, pinning him down with its weight.

With Lung down for now, she quickly added glowing runes to the back and breast plates enclosing Kaiser's chest, so her power could affect them, then telekinetically pulled the severely dented plates apart, and off him, so he could breathe again.

Then she turned over Kaiser's care to some regular gang members and turned her attention back to Lung.

She hoped that, by pinning his splayed arms and legs under heavy objects like derelict cars, she might load him down enough that he could not get back up again - especially given the bad situation he had as far as leverage went: it was all against him.

Then she and the rest of the Empire could disengage, ending the combat, and thus yanking the rug out from under Lung's super-power. She hoped it would end up with his power fading for lack of combat, down until he was just a regular man, still trapped under tons of concrete.

She supposed that could end him. Logically, it could, since, no matter how strong he got, there was always a limit to what he could lift, yet no theoretical limit to what could be piled on top of him, given time and opportunity.

She was certainly happy to give it a try and find out.

All that went through her mind as she turned from helping Kaiser to face Lung.

Then when she caught sight of Lung, her hopes were dashed.

He had already been too 'ramped-up' for her plan to work.

While she had worked on Kaiser, Lung had managed to roll the big concrete slab off of himself, tear himself free of the spikes, and stand up.

Then Lung took a moment to brag, and that gave Rune time enough to accelerate the derelict truck with which she had been planning to pin his right arm down. Her telekinesis got the truck going as fast as possible before ramming it into Lung, and shoving him backwards, through a brick wall, and into an abandoned shoe store.

The store front collapsed around Lung and the truck, while the Empire gangers and capes got in cars and left the area.

In the command center of the HMS Agamemnon, Captain Basil said "Now".

He said it purely for the benefit of those in the room who were not his Duplicates, since his Duplicates knew the moment he made the decision, and they acted just as quickly, in perfect concert.

Bas-Oon, Bas-Ket, Bas-Ra and Bas-Teal, sitting at the Teleport Console, Gravity Control Console, Telekinesis Console, and one of the Visual Scanner Consoles, all worked together, in perfect synchronization, to open a portal back to Saint Helena Island in Dimension 211, shove Lung through it, and close it again.

Beth asked, 'why did we wait, instead of just putting Lung back there the moment we saw him?"

Ron, in-between handfuls of popcorn, snarked "Are you kidding? Watching that fight was better than Pay-Per-View".

Abe volunteered the real answer, "never give an enemy information when you can avoid it. He will always use it against you if he can."

"True," Boz agreed. "And that's one of the reasons bragging is always a bad idea - whatever you are bragging about, that's information you are volunteering to the enemy. Plus it wastes time and a smart enemy will use that bit of time to his advantage and your detriment."

"Further," Simon added, "bragging is a way of trying to make yourself look good, basically by saying you are awesome in one or more ways. Yet when you think about it, it actually has the opposite effect: if you claim to be awesome, then lose the following fight or contest, you look far more foolish than if you'd kept your mouth shut. But if instead you win, your win is discounted - treated as less of an achievement than if you had not bragged, because of course someone who is awesome will win: that's just expected. Win or lose, bragging makes you look worse either way, completely apart from how boorish the bragging itself makes you look."

"Actions speak louder than words, and if you show me by your actions how awesome you are, I'll believe it, but if you just claim to be awesome and don't back it up with actions, you'll deserve only contempt." Abe agreed.

Simon nodded, and brushed a tiny speck of dust from his tie, "in some ways it is like a high-school senior picking a fight with a 6th-grader. If the senior wins, he gets no respect for it. Rather, he looks like a bully, picking unfair fights. And if he loses, or even takes a good blow or two from the 6th-grader, he looks like all kinds of a wimpy fool, for coming off that badly in such an unfair fight. Picking such a fight in the first place is where he really lost: he will look bad either way, and the only question is just how bad"

Boz jumped in, "if you read much history, you will find that the ancients understood this, and some of them were smart enough to do a sort of reverse-bragging: after winning a fight, they would praise the abilities of the enemy they had just defeated. It's a bit counter-intuitive, yet a very effective way to brag about yourself, since, if the enemy you just defeated was tough, clever, skilled, and so on, then you must be even more so to have defeated him. It claims all those abilities for yourself, in even greater measure than your enemy supposedly had them, and it does it in a way that sounds humble, since you're not directly claiming anything awesome about yourself, and it also uses that 'actions speak louder than words' principle, since your actual actions did include defeating this enemy."

He paused in thought a moment, then added, "you can do the same before a fight too. Then it makes it look less bad if you lose, and even better if you win, yet it has the downside that, if any of your guys actually believe the praise being said about your opponents, their morale may be affected, making a loss more likely. So they didn't do that form as often."

Ron jumped in saying, "all that is fine, but tell me: why did we bother sending him back? He got off that island before, he'll do it again."

"Exactly!" Boz grinned.

Beth understood, "we'll watch him closely to figure out how he gets off the island, so we can do something to stop it, right?"

"Exactly!" Boz grinned again. "If you don't know how to achieve your goal, at least take a step towards it by doing something you do know how to do. In learning how he escapes, we're a step closer to keeping him there."

"True," Ron allowed, but why keep him there? We could as easily dump him into space - say for example in the L1 La Grange point between here and the moon. I betcha he couldn't get back from that, even if he can survive in vacuum."

"No, not on his own, I expect," said Simon, "but someone has to be helping him. He didn't get back from a remote deserted island in another dimension on his own either."

"Good point," Boz allowed, "Saint Helena is 800 miles from the nearest small island, or 1200 miles west of the coast of Africa, or about twice that distance East of Rio De Janerio. With what we've been told about Lung's powers, I don't see any way he could even get himself to the mainland, much less back to this dimension. So someone has to be helping him. And just think about what that means."

He paused for a moment, then continued. "Lung is the founder and leader of a gang which kidnaps people, enslaves them, and forces them into a life of prostitution - a life so rough it usually ends up killing them within a year or two. He is far worse than a mere serial killer. So whomever is helping him is aiding and abetting this serial killer in returning to his horrifying activities."

Abe summed up: "Someone helping the bad guys like that are themselves bad guys. They've chosen what side they are on, and we can and should oppose them."

"Exactly," Boz agreed. "Whoever is helping him is contributing to the problems of this world. This place has tons of problems, and while we can't solve all their problems for them. the more we can solve before we leave, the better I will feel."

They set up a watch schedule to keep tabs on Lung around the clock, but as it turned out, they didn't need it - Lung was rescued before the first change of the watch.

One moment they were watching Lung kick plants in frustration, and the next moment a door opened in mid-air next to him.

Boz had been slouching in his chair, but sat up so fast he spilled his drink. "Quick!" he pointed to Beth, who was sitting at the ESP Console, "Move the uh, thing in through that ... thing."

He was flustered and couldn't think of the words, but Beth got the idea anyway and moved the ESP viewpoint in through the door right as Lung stepped through it.

The door closed behind Lung, and when it did, the ESP sensor winked out, but they still got a good look at Lung's destination for few seconds.

The sensor winked out since it's range did not include going to other Dimensions. They had managed to keep it in Dimension 211, at Saint Helena island, only by leaving open their Dimensional Portal between Dimension 29 where HMS Agamemnon was, and 211. With that in place, the sensor only counted as being a few thousand miles away from the battleship, which was well within its range.

What they saw during those few seconds looked like a standard conference room in an office building, with 4 capes, mostly wearing black, seated in white leather chairs at the white marble conference table.

They heard one of the 4 say, "That'll be another 3 favors you owe us".

Lung nodded agreement, even before he was done stepping through the door behind him.

The ESP sensor flew past Lung, out the conference room window and briefly looked back on a long low office building on top of a mesa, and probably extending down into it, underground.

Then Lung's door closed and the ESP sensor winked out.

Captain Basil spoke, "Thanks Beth, that was perfect. You figured it out just right. Sorry I got tangled up looking for the right words."

Ron guffawed, "and what an awesome tangle it was! Though I must say you missed a couple possible enhancements. You could, for example, have referred to the guy in that place that one time. Or maybe you could have thrown in a few phrases like 'you know what I mean'."

They all knew that Ron was just teasing for the humor value - not trying to make Boz feel bad, but just getting what humor he could from the situation.

So even Boz laughed along with the rest.

In a moment, Abe asked, "so - what now?"

Boz replied, "now we watch for Lung to show up in Brockton Bay again, so we can send him back to Saint Helena island once more. In the meantime, we need to look at the recording frame by frame and learn what we can about that office building on the mesa."