Chapter 20
Beth was in regular contact with Lisa, preparatory to Lisa's meeting with Coil - now just a few hours away.
And in those communications, the situation around Lung's rescue came up and was discussed.
Lisa offered to analyze the video footage.
And that is where they got most of what they learned from it.
Lisa said the office building on the mesa looked like a prison specialized in medical experiments. She said that the 4 in the conference room were among the leaders of that experimental lab-prison, and that they were crucial to its operation. She also said that the 4 in the conference room were there the first time Lung was rescued, judging by how he reacted to them.
And she said that the lab-prison, which called itself Cauldron, generated "Case 53's", which were horribly mutated people, often with very weird super-powers.
Based on Lisa's past performances, they believed her.
Once again, they maintained a close watch, this time looking for Lung in Brockton Bay.
And once again, they didn't have long to wait.
While Boz, Simon and Abe were head-down over a computer working out some plans, Beth, operating the Detect Mind Console, called out "got him! I've got a signature-match for Lung's mind on Peach Street near 5th. I'm bringing up Lung on the main screen now."
Everybody looked up at screen 1, in the front of the command center.
And there on screen was Lung, in the parking lot of an abandoned convenience store, finishing off a couple gang toughs from the Empire.
He had apparently been at it for a while, since he was already 'ramped-up' enough to have wings.
That did seem to be his style - to pick fights with someone weak, and draw out those fights long enough for his super-power to really get going. Then he'd go and get in more significant fights.
But this time, as the crew of the Agamemnon watched, a more significant fight came for Lung.
It was daytime on a cloudless day, so the scene was well-lit. Then the next moment, the light levels increased so much that the former scene looked like night-time by comparison.
Beth switched on some kind of compensation so they could make out details again in the new bright lighting.
And she was just in time for the crew to see a beam of super-bright light come from the sky and hit Lung directly. It's effect was similar to that of a firehose on a sand-castle - Lung's flesh evaporated immediately. His bones lasted only a fraction of a second, then they too evaporated, leaving behind only a small puddle of bubbling tarry goo.
In the stunned silence, Ron quipped, "OK, who in the betting pool had Purity, and under a second?"
Beth zoomed out a bit and the Empire cape known as Purity became visible on-screen, flying above the parking lot containing Lung's remains.
She was as Dinah had described her - with an all-white costume and radiating such bright white light she could not be looked at directly. She was like a miniature sun flying there, until Beth applied another filter allowing them to look directly at her.
As they were doing so, a small glass missile flew up at her from behind the abandoned convenience store. She moved rapidly, leaving bright white light behind here where she had been.
The missile changed direction to seek her despite her movements. So she blasted the light-seeking missile in mid-air with an extremely powerful laser beam from her hand, like the one she had burned Lung with. And though this laser blast was smaller and weaker, it had no trouble destroying the missile.
Ron, who had been learning a lot about local capes from Dinah, quipped, "it looks like the ABB has been shopping at ToyBox again, and knew to come prepared in case they ran into Purity. Too bad for Lung he didn't bring anything to help himself in such a case. I wonder how many more light-seeking missiles they bought?"
As if on-cue, 6 more missiles shot up from various places seeking Purity.
The Agamemnon's crew watched spell-bound for minutes, as Purity dodged and shot down missile after missile, and hunted ABB gangers with missile-launchers when she had spare moments in which to do so.
They were almost surprised when Lung re-entered the fray.
He flew up towards Purity, roaring a challenge and breathing flames for effect, since he was still too far away for those flames to reach Purity.
Purity responded with one more big laser beam from her hand, which hit Lung squarely and vaporized him almost as quickly as before.
A couple ABB goons took that as their chance to throw Bakuda-made glass bombs up at Purity. She just dodged, allowing the bombs to fall back to Earth and detonate, turning a couple rats and one unlucky ganger into glass.
Unfortunately, the tarry puddle of Lung's remains did not get hit by a glass-bomb and so was not turned into glass.
Purity blasted the gang goons, then left the area.
With nobody currently visible on-screen, Boz said, "now", and next to Lung's remains appeared a small dimensional portal, out of which came a few smoke grenades before the portal disappeared.
Those detonated a second later and obscured the area with smoke.
Then a bigger dimensional portal opened within the smoke screen.
The tar-like goo that was left of Lung had rained down onto a section of concrete parking-lot, and across the burned-out rusted remains of a Ford El Camino parked there.
The car and concrete slab both, with the tarry goo on them, got shoved through the dimensional portal, back to Saint Helena Island in Dimension 211.
As the portal closed again, Beth said, "so it's back to the round-the-clock watch schedule."
"Sorry about that," Boz apologized. "I'll take the first watch."
"That's OK," Beth responded. "My friends and I tend to be in here anyway, since this is where all the lovely sensor consoles are. We all joined the Astronomy Club for a reason, you know. We hang out here, look at the stars and planets, and chat anyway. So keeping eyes on Lung, or Coil, or both isn't much of a chore for us."
"Still, thanks very much," said Boz.
Bas-Oon, Bas-Teal, Bas-Ra, Bas-Ton, Bas-Innet, and Bas-Ket all echoed the sentiment as they settled into chairs at the Teleport Console, Telekinesis Console, two of the Gunnery Consoles, the ESP Console, and two of the Visual Sensors Consoles
Bas-Ra and Bas-Ton started rotating all the gun turrets on the Starboard side of the ship, They were aiming all the guns at an open teleportation portal about 100 feet away from the ship, and just above the water, according to the plan worked out earlier by Boz, Abe, and Simon.
While they did so, Ron speculated, "so what do you suppose would have happened if Purity had scooped up the bubbling tar which Lung turned into, and locked it in a strong safe or something like that - where there is too little space for Lung to get big or strong enough to break out again? How strong could he get if he was limited to about the size of a loaf of bread? And if his small size kept him weak, could he be kept in that safe indefinitely?"
Boz shrugged, "I'd guess so - until Lung starved or suffocated anyway. Maybe we'll find out if this plan doesn't work."
Beth asked, "Tell me again why this," she gestured at the array of guns on-screen, all pointed at a teleportation portal, "is necessary?"
Boz used some controls to eject a 3500 pound cruise-missile from its launcher. Then he grabbed it with telekinesis, positioned it right in front of the teleport portal and replied, "Lung is a serial rapist and serial murderer - he may not have personally committed either offense, but he ordered them, so he is as guilty of that, as Hitler is of killing 6 million Jews. Lung is being closely watched and actively supported by these folks in the office building on the mesa, who call themselves Cauldron. We haven't been able to find what dimension they are operating in, so, at present, our only way to do anything to stop them is through the portal they will open to rescue Lung again. We've been able to determine they also rescued Bakuda, and Lisa says they do horrifying medical experiments on prisoners. So it isn't just that Lung is their friend - they are an active evil, supporting active evils, and should be stopped if possible. We have a chance to help do so. And This is our chance - probably our only chance, to do so"
"It's a big building - we can't get them all."
Boz grinned, "that reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. Edmund Burke said "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."
"There's a cliche," Simon added, "saying 'cut off the head and you kill the whole snake'. It doesn't always apply, yet it does apply often enough to make it a cliche. We may not even get all of their leaders, but there's a very good chance we'll get some and seriously impair their operations, at least."
While he was speaking, Boz was setting the Determine Destiny console to maximize the chance that everybody essential to Cauldron's operation would be present.
It wasn't perfect, but would at least nudge things in the right direction.
Beth nodded, "OK, I follow the reasoning. What is the procedure again?"
Boz answered, "When they open their portal, I and my Duplicates will do three things."
"We'll move the ESP sensor through their portal for another quick look at them." said Bas-Oon.
"We'll move the far end of our portal from where it is now - 10 feet above Lung's head - to right up against their portal." said Bas-Ket.
"And we'll hit this big red button on my screen - the button labeled 'Bang!', which we just installed. It will fire our various guns in carefully calculated sequence and also ignite the rocket motor on that missile, so everything - a full broadside - goes into the portal end near us, out the portal end right up against Cauldron's portal, and through that into their base." said Bas-Ra.
"I just wish we could make the portal bigger so we could fit in more missiles," Boz groused, "but it has to match the size of the portal Cauldron sent last time, which is going to make things a pretty tight fit."
Simon added, "we figured our best approach is to put the missile at the top of the portal, the cannon shells - 12", 9.2" and 40mm Bofors - just below that, then the railgun shells, and lastly the lasers, particle beams and positron beams all down by the bottom of the portal opening. That way we hope to fit everything through without 'traffic jams' shooting down any of our own stuff."
Boz nodded, "and the issue becomes harder when you realize that one of the 4 Cauldron capes there is probably the one controlling the Portal. We need to hit them all directly, since we don't know what their powers are and want to make sure to take them out, yet it is possible that the moment we hit that cape, the portal will close. So we have to time it all so that fast things like lasers and comparatively slow things like 12" shells are all through the portal before anything hits an enemy cape."
Ron asked, "we're using the Cheat Consoles here, aren't we?"
"You better believe it!" Boz smiled. "We've got the Probability Control Console, the Order Console, and the Determine Destiny Console aiding the effort in the best ways we can think of."
"You know," mused Ron, "There is a way we could fit in more missiles. This ship can do so much that we keep forgetting the Shrinking Console. We can use it to make big missiles small - shrink their measurements 12 times, from 20.4 inches diameter to 1.7 inches diameter and about 20 inches long. Then release that effect once they arrive at the target."
"Ooh! yeah! that's a great idea, please get right on that," Boz asked. "Make them just like the current missile I have out there already. It's choice number 3872 in the Replicator Console. I figure it's our best bet for affecting parts of the building that we can't hit directly. It's got a small bursting charge, then about a thousand pounds of that Tinker-altered Thermite gel we captured from the Merchants gang. It will make one heck of a fire."
"On it." Ron went to the Replication Console and spent a moment there making more missiles, resting on the aft deck in special cradles that supported them.
Then he went to the Shrinking Console for a moment.
Then he stepped outside briefly.
When he got back, he declared, "I figured that maintaining spacing between them all could be tricky, so I just zip-tied all the new missiles together in one bundle of 16 missiles - I was able to fit 4 more in by making it a bit oblong to better match the shape of the portal without taking any of the space set aside for other shells. We can pick up that bundle, move it, and fire it as if it were a single missile, and when it loses contact with us - as it will when the portal closes - it will unshrink and detonate."
"Nice," Boz exclaimed, "but won't it be inaccurate, zip-tied together like that?"
"Yes," Ron grinned, "but it only has to fly about an inch more than it's own length, so about 21 inches total. How lost can it get in that distance? You'll put the nose of the missile bundle a fraction of an inch short of our portal. The moment we see their portal open, we'll move the far end of our portal to within a fraction of an inch short of their portal. So when we ignite the missiles, they only have to fly their own length plus those two fractions of an inch, and that'll put them in the target building: Cauldron's base."
Boz used the ship's Telekinesis Console to pick up the missile bundle and position it before the open Portal.
He also signaled Abe to raise the ship, saying "while Lung hasn't re-formed enough to be rescue-able yet, I think it's better to be safe than sorry, so let's raise the ship now."
Abe nodded, then, as they'd planned, had the ship lift off and fly 10 feet above the surface of the ocean, and hover there.
Wave action made ships pitch and roll, which made accurate gunnery from them very difficult, since they could unexpectedly move in any of the three dimensions. Gyro-stabilization could help with that, and the Agamemnon used that, as well as computerized aiming and timing so the guns fired, not exactly when the trigger was pressed, but as soon thereafter as the ship's motion happened to have the guns pointed on-target. That was fine for normal bombardments. But for this one, they needed split-second timing so the various shots did not collide. They didn't need their own lasers, for example, shooting down their own shells.
Hovering ten feet above the waves made the ship a lot more stable and would make this bombardment a lot easier.
They spent a minute re-checking the aiming points of all the weapons involved.
Then they chatted about whatever came to mind.
Nobody wanted to leave the command center and possibly miss the show. Lung's previous rescues had come soon after he got to the island, so they expected this one would too.
Ron interrupted a general conversation about growing mangoes on Mars to speak, in his best imitation of a boring professor's voice. "Now pay attention class, here is a very interesting phenomenon you don't get to see very often: the original Lung crawling up out of the primordial ooze which spawned him." Ron droned.
They all looked up to see a small version of Lung, maybe 2 feet tall, emerging from the puddle of ooze that had been slowly gathering itself from where it had been smeared over the old car and concrete slab.
"It won't be long now," Simon opined.
Lung didn't actually move until the remaining ooze had all been absorbed into him.
By then he was three and a half feet tall.
Then he stretched and walked forwards a few paces, apparently just to see if he could.
While the crew in the command center watched, Lung continued to grow as his regeneration continued to work.
"Well that at least answers one question - whether local super-powers supply their own energy, or if they need other energy sources to work." Simon speculated. "Lung's regeneration is obviously supplying it's own energy from somewhere. Otherwise he'd be frantically eating everything he could get just to replace his own mass like that."
"I see some figs near him," Ron offered. "He certainly sees them too, but isn't eating any. Do you suppose he knows they are figs?"
"Who knows," Simon answered, "but if he needed food energy in order to regenerate, he would at least nibble them experimentally. Also the nearby persimmons, and the Jerusalem Artichokes."
"Weird," Boz remarked. "In our dimension, none of the plants you just named were found on the island until the Europeans imported such things. But in Dimension 211, there are no Europeans, nor any other humans, so how do you suppose they got there?"
"Who knows? Maybe they..." Simon began, before he was cut off by someone gasping.
As soon as Lung had reached 5 feet tall, a portal opened in the air 2 feet in front of him.
"Fire", Boz commanded, just for effect, since his Duplicates had already done so, as well as moving their ESP sensor and the far end of their own portal.
The ESP sensor moved into the conference room of Cauldron's base.
The far end of Agamemnon's portal moved up by Cauldron's portal, only half an inch apart and with their tops, bottoms, and edges aligned to make it act like one portal.
And all the guns fired, milliseconds apart, in a carefully-calculated sequence, accompanied by a long and incredibly loud rolling boom sound.
The guns with the slowest muzzle-velocities fired first, to give their shells a head-start before faster shots caught up to them.
They'd arranged it that way so that the lasers - traveling at the speed of light - wouldn't arrive first, kill the enemy capes and thereby close the portal before anything else reached it and got through.
They were not certain the portal would close like that, but they wanted to be careful in case it did.
So as the missiles ignited and moved through the portal, the 12-inch cannons fired first: two from the front turret - angled aft at 45 degrees to point at the portal roughly amidships - and 2 in the aft turret - angled forwards nearly 45 degrees to aim at the same portal.
Before Grandpa had modified them, the 12 inch guns had a muzzle-velocity of 2700 feet per second, meaning shells from them would traverse 100 feet in one twenty-seventh of a second. They were faster now, yet still the lowest-velocity guns the Agamemnon had.
The four 9.2-inch guns in 2 turrets amidships fired at about the same time
They were followed by four quad-barreled Bofors 40mm guns, firing as fast as they could.
Then the four railguns sharing one central turret, also firing on auto-fire.
Then the 6 particle beams, mounted along the side of the ship's boxy superstructure, and all firing at different angles.
Then the 3 positron beams mounted atop the central superstructure, and lastly the lasers fired: 4 from the ships bottom, currently 10 feet above the water, and 6 more mounted around the superstructure.
Ron had wanted to add in a couple of King Tiger tanks, sitting on the fore and aft decks and firing from there, but with them not connected to the central firing computer, timing their shots would have been too hard, so they skipped it, on the chance that one of them would fire too early and ruin the rest of the broadside by closing the portal.
All these guns were firing at different angles, from up and down the length of the ship but all aimed at the same portal.
The flight paths of their shots, if drawn on an overhead map, would look like an asterisk centered on the portal - all the shots converged there, then diverged again after passing through it.
Consequently only a Bofors gun, a particle beam, and a laser were aimed at, and hit, the four Cauldron capes seated at one end of the conference table about ten feet from their side of the portal.
One 40mm armor-piercing incendiary shell hit the woman dressed as a doctor. Two more hit the man with a pocket-protector. The eyeless man was hit by the particle-beam. And the pale thin young man next to him caught the laser.
Immediately thereafter, the portal winked out.
Before it did, it could be seen that the battleship's other shots went through walls and the floor.
The 850 pound 12-inch shells, and 380 pound 9.2-inch shells had been loaded with high-explosives, set to penetrate a few interior walls before going off.
And it would be interior walls they would be piercing, since the Cauldron capes sat about 12 feet away from the window to the outside and had placed the portal in-between them and the window because that was where there was a nice clear space at the foot of the conference table.
The Bofors guns had all been loaded with armor-piercing incendiary rounds, so they'd penetrate far and cause fires all along the way. Some of these, and other weapons, would penetrate the floor of the conference room and into lower floors of the Cauldron office building, since the battleships guns were above the portal and firing downwards towards it.
The railguns would penetrate farther yet and cause even more fires - both of those due to their extremely high velocities. Boz had aided that effect by choosing a particular type of ammunition for them - one made of magnesium, with steel 'driving bands' for the rail-gun magnets to 'grip' and accelerate. The magnesium moved so fast that air friction alone was more than enough to ignite the magnesium, which then burned hot enough to ignite anything else they encountered. The 4 railguns had each gotten 2 shells through the portal before it closed.
And the 16 missiles were set to detonate as soon as they hit anything. Their 50 pound bursting charges wouldn't do much by comparison to their nearly 1000 pound TinkerTech thermite gel payloads.
The Cauldron headquarters was going to have a very bad day.
Agamemnon's crew would have to analyze the recorded footage to know more, but everybody was pretty confident that Cauldron's base was thoroughly wrecked.
They hoped so, since it was the one shot they'd get, unless some unexpected opportunity came up.
Boz had dismissed the portal before Lung could react. Not that there was really anything Lung could have done while the exit end of the Agamemnon's portal was a fraction of an inch short of the entrance end of Cauldron's portal. Lung was bigger than that fraction of an inch, so could not have used either portal. So while both portals were up, Lung could neither get through either one, nor interfere with the shells as they flew through.
But once Cauldron's portal had closed, it would have been possible for Lung to circle around to the far side of Agamemnon's portal and come through.
So Boz had dismissed it, since that was fastest. He could adjust its location quickly when prepared, but only once, and he'd done that to match the portals once Cauldron's had appeared. So he had not been ready to do it again a moment later.
Still, out of curiosity, now that the rush of events were over, they went ahead and put a new portal a hundred feet above Lung and watched him for a while, just to make sure.
No new portal from Cauldron formed.
Lung stayed on Saint Helena Island, all alone in Dimension 211.
They watched him for a while, then stopped. When they last looked, they saw Lung had gone down by the seashore and was trying to attack fish, apparently in hopes that would ramp up his super-power.
-0-0-0-
Boz spent a little time looking for Bakuda to exile her again, but they hadn't previously noted down the 'mental thumbprint' she had in the Detect Mind console. So searching wasn't automatic and easy.
Then it was time to help Lisa.
As agreed previously, they'd kept a continuous watch on Coil, even while some of them also watched Lung.
Coil hadn't done anything particularly interesting though.
But at the previously agreed-upon time, 10 minutes before Lisa's meeting with Coil, the crew of the Agamemnon acted.
-0-0-0-
Coil - or, as he liked to think of himself 'the magnificent super-villain Coil' - was furious and excited at the same time.
He was furious that the Undersiders - the group of capes he controlled through Lisa aka the cape TattleTale - had failed in the bank-robbery he'd set them up to do for him.
He was excited about the punishment he was going to inflict on Lisa for her failure. He was going to enjoy torturing her.
As usual, he would do it in an alternate timeline created by his own super-power and dismissed the same way when he was done, so there would be no evidence at all of what he'd done.
That way, he could continue employing her without worry that she would retaliate or even hold a grudge - she couldn't, since she would not remember a thing.
Only Coil remembered what happened in timelines he had dismissed.
In eager anticipation, Coil had already split the timeline.
In Timeline A, he was in his office and would conduct a more or less normal interview with Lisa. That was the timeline he planned to keep.
In Timeline B, Coil was waiting in a soundproofed supply room, wherein, out of sight, behind stacks of boxes, was a 'spare' hospital bed', supposedly kept as a 'backup' for the small medical facilities here in his secret base, in case those got overloaded such as they might after a battle.
Coil liked to use the 'spare' bed for torture. It came with lots of straps to hold the patient, or, in this case, victim, in place, and had trays of special tools next to it.
In a few minutes, two guards would escort Lisa in and Coil could get started.
He could hardly wait.
He checked his watch - 11 minutes to go.
He stood and then sat back down again, to adjust his position on the crate he'd been sitting on.
The big, wooden crate was full of the new UAV's - remote control planes - his troops had wanted.
Still not comfortable, he got up again, got a crate of miscellaneous mercenary supplies, and put it on top of the first, positioned as a back-rest.
He sat back down, and seconds later, at exactly ten minutes 'till the hour, a tremendous force shoved Coil backwards.
It happened to both Coil's, in both timelines, simultaneously.
In Timeline A, Coil and the office chair he'd been sitting on, got shoved backwards about 3 feet, then fell downwards about 10 feet. As he fell, he could see, hanging in the air above him, a portal like the ones Cauldron made. For a split second, he saw his office through the portal, then the portal closed. About the same time, he landed on his back in a small grassy meadow near a sandy beach.
In Timeline B, his experience was the same, but it was Coil and the crates he was sitting on that went through the portal, landing on the same grassy meadow.
Coil looked around, and, seeing no-one around, vented his frustrations by looking skywards and yelling "damn all punctual people!"
A problem with Coil's power was that, if an opponent decided ahead of time to do something to Coil, and stuck with that decision, then no matter what Coil did with the timelines after that, that opponent acted on their plans in both timelines no matter what the circumstances in each of them were. Whether Coil was in his home, his PRT office, his hidden base or somewhere else, did not matter, nor did it matter whether Coil was far removed from, or quite near, the location of the Coil in the other timeline - as long as his opponent could find him and went ahead with their plan, they did it in both timelines.
That could be a real problem for Coil.
Luckily for him it didn't happen often. And when it did, his opponents had mostly not been very punctual, meaning they allowed the small vagaries of life - the little things that always come up - to affect their timing. To them, it didn't matter if they acted precisely at the appointed time, or a few seconds, or even minutes, later.
But to Coil, that mattered a great deal. If he got ambushed in one timeline, but not in another, he had at least a few seconds in the un-ambushed timeline to act and try to prevent ambush there as well - in theory, at least. Coil had trouble deciding whether to act quickly in such cases, or let them play out so he learned more before dismissing a timeline.
But there was no such window of opportunity for him this time: whichever timeline he dismissed now, he'd still be here, wherever here was. If he dismissed Timeline B, he'd get to keep his office chair. If he dismissed Timeline A, he'd keep 2 crates of mercenary supplies - an obvious choice. Otherwise, there was no real difference.
In Timeline B, he looked at the crates that had come with him and noticed again that the big crate had unmanned aerial vehicles. These were remote-control planes with 6 foot wingspans and video cameras, which fed live video back to the controller unit, which was a lot like a tablet computer.
He checked and that controller unit was also in the crate, along with a solar charger.
"Well, at least I'll know more soon enough." he groused, then set about assembling and preparing a UAV for flight.
