Chapter 6
Lisa had approached the young man in the grocery store, and spoken to him, in order to "wind him up and watch him run around".
He seemed like a good prospect for such teasing, since he was so obviously a stranger here in some way.
Even the guard at the door had noted that, and was watching the tall young man for signs of trouble.
And the guard didn't have Lisa's super-power.
She had the ability to notice, accurately interpret, and analyze clues - even the most subtle ones, such as micro-expressions on the face, body language, variations in audible intonations, and such things as the presence and type of a certain kind of smudge on his shoes.
From that smudge, she knew he'd been at sea recently.
From the callouses on his hands, she knew he was a weightlifter, but a casual one - not one driven to win competitions, but one who did it for the stress-relief.
From a different kind of callous on his right hand, she knew he was a regular target shooter, but again, just a casual one - doing it for enjoyment, not combat-preparation.
She could see the barely-discernible bulge of a gun in a holster inside his waistband, even though it was covered by his shirt, which wasn't tucked in.
From other clues she knew that he was neat and tidy, so the shirt wasn't tucked in for a reason - to make access to the gun quicker if needed.
Yet his body language said he was not focused on the gun any more than on his keys - both were in the same mental category, which could be labeled "only important when needed".
She could also see that he had no fear at all of any "locals", even though he knew they could be dangerous.
Yet he had none of the body-language or other "tells" of being a cop, guard, or cape.
So, since she had a couple minutes before she had to go, she had decided to go "poke the enigma" and see what interesting things may happen.
Plus, it gave her a chance to play the "know-it-all" - she dearly loved doing that.
And it should be extra fun with this young man, since he had a very expressive face, yet clearly thought he had a "poker-face", in other words, a very un-expressive face.
While she was thinking, the tall young brown-haired stranger with green eyes had looked her over, then started to speak.
Lisa interrupted him. "There's no use in denying it - I'm a Fortune-Teller."
That was not true, but was useful to conceal her power and yet still play know-it-all. Usually in her cape ID, she claimed to be psychic, but, out-of-costume, in her civilian id, like now, claiming to be a fortune-teller was similar enough to work, and just different enough to get by. And whether they chose to believe she told fortunes by sneaky charlatan-tricks, or some kind of mystic power, or both, it still worked fine for her.
She continued, "by the way, don't ever play poker - you'll lose."
His expression changed, which was part of the reason she liked this kind of thing - it tended to prod the target into revealing more information.
"Yes, I can see you believe me now - at least a little bit - don't you, poker-loser? Or should I call you something else?"
The flustered man choked out "My name is Basil."
She could see that was the truth, so decided to get back to more interesting territory, like where he was from.
"Yes, an unusual name, like you, from an unusual place. You're from someplace very far away...yet very close, in a way. It's somewhere very different, yet very similar. Hmm, how to make sense of that ... another dimension?"
Bas-Teal started in surprise, and began to object "wait..."
But Lisa cut him off "Yes, it's another dimension. Is it Earth-Aleph? No, I can see you've only heard about that, and not very much at that. Interesting. We'll have to pursue that topic later - for now you really need to take a breath and calm down - you're getting the guard at the front door all agitated. I'm friendly and won't bite."
She grinned in smug satisfaction "Oh, that was a direct-hit! It's me that makes you nervous, not the guard... in fact I can see that you have no fear of him at all, even though your gawking has had him eyeing you. Very interesting."
"But..." he started to say.
She cut him off again.
"What is also interesting," she continued, greatly enjoying herself, "is that you don't know it's not normal for us to have armed guards in grocery stores. Yep. That's new just in the last two weeks or so - everyone is trying to handle their own security more, since the government troopers and capes are all frantically busy looking for information on what the Simurgh is up to and where she went after she disappeared in a cloud of dust."
"What..." Bas-Teal started.
"You don't know who the Simurgh is," she interrupted. "That's more confirmation that you are definitely not from here. Well I'll tell you. She's what we call an Endbringer, since they cause so much devastation. When she is not driving whole cities insane, she parks in orbit, looking almost like a human woman with 11 wings..."
She started in sudden reaction. "You recognize her description...You've encountered her ... and even had something to do with her disappearance...no, not disappearance...she's dead! Wow! You are completely confident that the Simurgh is dead! Amazing. We really need to talk more. I can help you and you can help me. But I'm late for something right now, so here's my number. I'm Lisa. Call tonight."
She handed him a card with a phone number, looked at his face again and said "I can see you don't trust me, so come on, on my way out I'll give you the info you need to find the wholesale distributor that supplies this and other grocery stores - you can make your bulk food order there."
She took his unresisting arm and walked him out of the store, chattering the whole time.
-0-0-0-
Basil shook his head in amazement, as he watched Bas-Teal finish talking with the girl and start off for the wholesale distributor.
Then Boz pulled his perception back to the here-and-now to check the sensors again.
He spent a moment looking at the displays on each of the various unmanned sensors consoles. since it wouldn't be good for a threat such as Leviathan - whatever it was - to sneak up on them.
He'd almost finished this latest round of such checks, when a familiar voice came from Console 3 - Communications.
Basil recognized the voice as that of Big Tom, with whom he frequently lifted weights in the ship's gym.
Big Tom said, in a strained voice, "Sprich mit base. We've been attacked and need extraction to the ship's hospital. All 4 of us have been shot. Two of the guys need immediate medical attention - they're hurt pretty bad. One just has flesh-wounds. I only got hit in the Kevlar vest. We're not currently under fire: I think we got them all. So it's not a 'hot extraction' but be careful, there could be more nearby. Uh, 'Over'? How does this Comms thing work? I hope it does work..."
While Tom was speaking, Basil had hurried over to Console 46, Teleportation, and brought Beth along with him, since now was as good a time as any to show her how to use it.
Basil spoke "Sprich mit Tom Gunderson. Tom, it's Boz. Hang in there, I'm setting up a portal as we speak. It'll take you right from where you are - I'm getting the coordinates from the Comms console now - straight to our hospital, where I will meet you in just a second."
"Boy am I glad to hear from you Boz. It's always nice when the gear works as it is supposed to, but until you spoke I wasn't sure. Anyway. leave the portal open for a couple minutes, since we'll have to move the guys carefully and slowly."
"Ok," Basil answered. "You should see the portal now."
"Yes, it's here and we're starting through."
"I'll met you in the hospital then," Boz answered, as he started towards the hatch, calling back to Beth "You have the con, uh, I mean you're in charge."
The hospital was in the most-protected part of the ship, near the command center, so he got there quickly.
Then Basil and Big Tom brought the two seriously wounded through on stretchers, while the lightly wounded man kept watch and stayed ready in case of more trouble.
When they had all 4 plus Boz back on the ship, Boz said "Sprich mit base. Beth, we've got them. Shut down the portal like I showed you."
The portal winked out and he said "That worked. Thanks and out.'
Then he worked on getting Console 13 to heal the wounded, while taking advantage of the opportunity to show the others how to do it.
In no time, all 4 explorers - Tom and his 3 friends - were completely healed of all their bullet wounds, broken bones, scrapes, bruises, and some nasty cuts they had on their faces which Tom said were part of some gang initiation.
Then they took a moment to tell Basil what had happened.
Tom started, "We were just walking along, enjoying scenery unlike the islands - this place is very different from Tortola. Then a few punks come around a corner, and their leader yells 'Hey, big guy, see if you can tough *this* out' and shoots me."
He sighed, "As you know, I bench-press 450, and the muscles show, so punks are always trying to show they are the best by taking me on. It's why I learned Aikido - since they usually use a knife or gun when they try to prove how tough they are, and it helps with disarming them. It's also why I joined the gun club. Though, after doing so, I learned how fun target shooting really is."
He shook his head, "I digress. Anyway, the punk was drawing his gun as he spoke, but as soon as I saw that, so was I. He hit me on the bullet-proof vest and knocked the wind out of me. I think it broke a rib too. But before that really registered on me and pain spoiled my aim, I hit him too: in the neck. He was done. But by this time his friends and mine were all firing at each-other."
Tom looked around the group. "We were obviously better shots. I expect we'd spent more time at the gun-range. If they've spent any at all, that is. But being shot at really makes it hard to concentrate on your sight-picture. They had obviously been shot at before. So all-in-all, it was about even, as far as I could tell. Then I got hit again in almost the same spot as before. I blacked out briefly due to the pain, and when I came-to, the last couple gang toughs were holding him down," he gestured to the man who had been lightly wounded, "and cutting his face, while saying something about a gang-initiation. I think they said we were wearing the wrong colors in their territory too. If their territory is extensive, more of us may run into similar problems, since we don't know anything about their colors or boundaries."
Tom took a small gun out of an ankle-holster and started re-loading it while he spoke. "They had kicked away my main gun, but hadn't taken any time to look for any backup guns. They still had their guns out and ready. So I drew my backup," he held up the gun in question, "to make them stop. They heard the sounds I'd made, and turned, ready to fire. But I got them first, then called the base for help. I'm really glad that worked, by the way."
They all agreed, and spent a moment re-hashing events, then Beth's voice spoke inside Basil's inner ear. "Sprich mit Basil Snodgrass. Captain, we're getting more calls from groups of our crew being assaulted by the locals. I think you need to come back to the command center. The first group I'm bringing back should be arriving just outside the hospital now."
There was a knock on the hatch.
Basil acknowledged Beth's call while opening the hatch.
Four wounded men were there, and he ushered them into the hospital, while saying "Tom, you're in charge here. Get these guys healed and show them how to use the equipment. Also send someone to the mess-hall to set up a movie showing. I remember reading that in Kosovo, when the city was under attack, they found that nightly showings of comedy movies really helped people deal with the stress. It's something, at least, and I expect our guys will need something. But if you know of anything better, do that too, or instead. Use your judgment."
Tom called his agreement to Basil's retreating back.
When Basil got to the command center, Beth was talking to one group while setting up a teleportation portal for another.
He went to the main console - Abe's usual station - and started the ship moving.
Then he moved to take over the Teleportation Console.
As he moved, he explained. "We're 12 miles offshore and need to be closer in. The far end of the teleport portal can be up to 200,000 miles away - most of the way to the moon from here. But the near end has to open within 20 miles of the ship. So much of the town is currently out of range."
"Isn't a portal two-way?" Beth asked.
"Uh, yah. Good point," a flustered Boz answered. "We can set the "far" end anywhere in town - or within 200,000 miles - and the "near" end of the portal here in the ship. They couldn't see it, since the far end isn't visible like the near end, but we could talk them through finding it. I guess I was thinking of that, and certain special teleportation functions that only work one-way and need to be initiated from the "near" end. Whatever. Thanks for the reminder."
Further conversation between them was cut off by more distress calls from crew members under attack in town.
-0-0-0-
Shadow Stalker was in a terrible mood.
Her work had been unusually stressful for about two weeks, and she felt like she was ready to kill someone.
She worked as a Ward.
That was the youth branch of the Protectorate, which was the government-sponsored super-hero organization responsible for policing super-powered activities.
That was what the marketing literature said.
In fact, it was more like slavery.
She had been offered the choice to join or go to prison, which was rather more restrictive than most Wards' options, though how much so was debatable.
When someone was found to have super-powers, they received immense pressure to join the Protectorate or the Wards, complete with implicit threats if they chose not to.
And for many, joining was really the only option, since using super-powers to make money in any way was effectively illegal.
Not that they made much money in the Wards - they got paid minimum wage to risk their lives and always be available to be called up, just like soldiers.
That's why she thought of it as slavery.
Before she'd been arrested for murder and forced into the Wards, she'd enjoyed herself a lot more. She liked to stalk the city, hunting the weak. She very much saw life in terms of the weak versus the strong, with herself as one of the strong, with the strong welcome to do anything they could get away with. The more you could get away with, the stronger that proved you were..
She was fond of pinning people to the wall with her broad-headed crossbow bolts. Sometimes they died, but her body-count was still in the single-digits when she'd been caught.
Yes, she saw herself as very strong.
Her super-power had helped a lot, since people shooting back at her achieved nothing. She could make her body insubstantial so the bullets passed through her harmlessly. That had saved her more than once, in this dangerous city full of armed gang-members.
She didn't understand how her power worked, but remembered her high-school science class teacher having mentioned once that most of what we consider to be solid matter is in fact empty space, with the distances between adjacent molecules being really far. So she supposed maybe it was some enhancement of that. She stayed the same size when she went insubstantial, but could walk through walls and things like that.
And now she was ready to kill again. Work was bad enough in the best of times, since they were always on-call.
But for about 2 weeks, it had been more like they were always on-duty, while the capes in the Protectorate and troops of the PRT ran around looking for clues about where the Simurgh was and what she was up to.
Shadow Stalker had had enough & was ready for some 'old-fashioned stress-relief' as she liked to think of it.
She had a nice perch on the roof of a two-story building across from the library and a couple other buildings.
Her all-black costume made her hard to see where she lay in the shadow of the small shed-like building housing the stairway's roof-access.
Her crossbow was ready to fire a broad-head bolt - not those lame tranquilizer bolts that the Wards made her use.
And the next person she saw whose face she did not like would get shot. They would wish they were strong like her, though briefly. She couldn't afford to leave them alive to testify.
No, the official story would be that a gang-member had seen her, shot at her, and she'd shot back and killed them.
She even had things to plant on them to support the story: a hat and scarf in the local gang colors, and a cheap gun she'd stolen a while back.
If things went well, she might even get a commendation for this.
She laughed cruelly at the thought
-0-0-0-
Bas-Oon reflected, as he hurried to wrap things up and leave, that visits to the library were never "done". There was always more to do there. Much, much more.
So every visit to the library ended when something else became too insistent about demanding time.
In this case, his crew were being attacked all over the city, and he needed to go help.
He planned to get in the car he had 'rented' at the airport by trading a 5-gallon can of gas for its use for an afternoon. then drive to the rescue of the nearest group of his crew that needed it.
The teleporter was rescuing them too, but could only do one group at a time.
So there was a backlog he could help with.
He hurried out the front door of the library and had only made it a dozen or so steps towards the beat-up old sedan he'd rented, when suddenly a crossbow-bolt hit him dead-center in the chest.
That was right in the middle of the trauma plate in his bullet-proof vest, which stopped the bolt cold and spread the impact over a reasonably wide area. But it was still like getting punched by a strong man.
Though slightly dazed, he still immediately reached for his own weapon. Flipping his untucked shirt out of the way, and taking the slim disintegration pistol from its waistband holster, he switched off the safety and prepared to fire.
But before he could return fire, he needed a target.
His assailant had fired from cover somewhere, and Bas-Oon had not yet spotted whomever it was.
He might not ever have spotted her, if he hadn't been a pilot. Pilots are used to thinking in terms of 3 dimensions. Most other people just stick with the simpler 2 dimensions they ordinarily deal with.
When Bas-Oon looked up, he saw her: a white face-mask of a frowning woman stood out first, there in some shadowy part of a second-floor rooftop.
Quickly he made out the prone body, all in black behind the mask, and the fact that she was reloaded and already aiming at him again.
It looked like she was aiming right at his left eye, if he was any judge.
That would have unnerved most people.
But Bas-Oon was a Duplicate. His original, Basil, was safe on the battleship, so there was nothing this assassin could do to him with her crossbow that would be more than the minor inconvenience of making another Duplicate.
So Bas-Oon's nerves were steady as could be.
He carefully aimed and fired the disintegrator. It was currently set on his favorite setting - where the beam would come out as a narrow cone, rather than a pencil-thin line. That made it a lot easier to hit, though it spread the energy out a lot. At this range, the cone wold be about a foot wide at its far end.
The green disintegration beam passed the crossbow bolt in-flight, but did not hit it.
If it had, it would have disintegrated it and continued on barely weakened.
That was another reason to fire it as a cone rather than a beam.
The beam traveled much faster than the bolt, so Bas-Oon was able to see it hit before he himself got hit in turn.
The wall coaming - he knew that wasn't quite the right word but still thought of the raised edge of the wall that way anyway - got hit and disintegrated, along with the white face-mask, the head and shoulders behind that, and part of the crossbow.
The temporarily-inert fine powder that had been the electrons within the disintegrated material fell more or less straight down.
The powder that had formed the atomic nuclei of the disintegrated material was all positively charged, so it repelled each-other violently in all directions at once, forming something like a spherical lightning bolt, with enough energy to kill most people by itself.
Bas-Oon barely had time for that all to register, before her crossbow bolt entered his brain and killed him. Or rather, it would have killed him if he was the original. Instead, it simply dismissed the Duplicate, which vanished.
A moment later, another lightning bolt struck Shadow Stalker's corpse, when the normal negative charge returned to the small pile of temporarily-inert electrons, and they suddenly repelled each-other much like the nuclei had done.
In under a minute, a fresh Duplicate of Basil teleported in to the bathroom of the library, which they had first scanned to make sure it was empty.
The new Duplicate could have been named Bas-Oon again, since nothing was lost when a Duplicate got dismissed, either intentionally or by taking damage.
Instead it was named Bas-Ra, since that city had been at war in Basil's lifetime and he expected this Duplicate to be at war soon as well.
Bas-Ra quickly went out the front of the library, and picked up the gear that Bas-Oon had dropped when he disappeared. The gear was all Replicated, but Bas-Oon had loaded the remote-scanning unit of the Replicator with information from the library, and they didn't want to have to start that project over due to losing the data, which they would if they simply dismissed that unit before getting it back to the ship.
Then he went to the beat-up rented car and drove away, planning to pick up right where Bas-Oon had left off.