Space Battleship Agamemnon

by Calculonius

In another universe, a genius inventor born in future Japan would create the Space Battleship Yamato. In this universe, he was born in 1910 Britain. In 1927, HMS Agamemnon was sent to his family's scrapyard. He kept it and tinkered with it for fun for 60 years, resulting in the Space Battleship Agamemnon. This is the story of the Space Battleship Agamemnon and its crew.

32. Chapter 32

Chapter 32

The cape known as Chariot had had a very busy and unusual week.

He did not normally do 'cape things', because his employer, Coil, wanted to hold him in reserve.

But Coil had been unreachable for almost a week, and on top of that, Chariot had had an unusual opportunity he'd wanted to pursue.

Chariot was a Tinker focused on mobility. He had a flying battlesuit, flying jetpack, and some obvious things like that. But he knew he could do more if he could get inspiration - if he could see interesting mobility-related things.

And 6 days ago, he had.

He'd just been walking down the street in Brockton Bay, minding his own business when a gang-fight broke out. He'd sheltered as best he could, and watched. And soon he'd seen an amazing thing: a sort of doorway or portal, opened up in mid-air. Out of the portal had come some robots, who shot up the gang and chased after them, while other robots collected some wounded people and went back through the doorway into a well-lit crowded room that looked like a cafeteria.

When the portal closed, Chariot had gone over to where it had been and looked for any clues.

He'd found no clues as to what the portal was or how it worked, though merely seeing it had set his mind buzzing with ideas.

But he had found two backpacks, loaded with rare and valuable spices and chocolate.

He'd almost passed out in amazement. He knew some guys - one in a junkyard and one in an electronics repair shop - who he could trade things to in exchange for parts to tinker with. And he was sure they'd be happy to trade for spices and chocolate.

So in one moment, he'd gotten both the means to get parts to tinker with, and an idea of the next thing he wanted to build.

He'd wasted no time.

He'd had a working teleportation portal by that evening, built into something that looked like a handheld hairdryer with a built-in smartphone.

He'd successfully tested it, but hadn't put it to any serious use yet before he got contacted by TrainWreck, one of Coil's other 'sleeper agents'.

TrainWreck had been one of the capes leading the gang known as the Merchants. He'd also been spying on them for Coil.

Then suddenly, TrainWreck had found himself the only remaining cape leader of the Merchants, and also found himself unable to contact Coil.

So TrainWreck had decided to take over the Merchants - which was the most bloodless coup ever, since he was already a leader within the gang and now there were no other leaders left - and, while he was at it, make some changes.

It was those changes that he'd wanted Chariot's help with.

It had been on a contract basis - Chariot had worked for TrainWreck on a couple specific projects, but not joined the Merchants gang, since neither of them felt that Coil would have wanted that.

TrainWreck had checked - carefully - what other capes may be for hire to help as well, and not found what he was looking for.

But Chariot had seen how it was done - certain circumlocutions on the right online bulletin boards - and had advertised his own services for sale, just in case Coil didn't come back.

They both feared he might not come back, since his main organization had been taken over by someone named Lisa, who had actually had the gall to contact Chariot and TrainWreck on her own and offer them jobs.

Both were too loyal to Coil for that.

But neither of them, nor both together, was powerful enough to challenge the organization Lisa had already put together. So they went their ways and let her go hers.

So Chariot had dome a bunch of work on TrainWreck's new project - junk tanks - for him and alongside him.

They were both Tinkers.

TrainWreck made things out of junk, especially steam-powered things.

And Chariot specialized in mobility.

So TrainWreck was making tanks and Chariot handled the mobility parts of that - the engines, tracks, steering, transmissions etc.

The recent attack on the town - including on the Merchants - by some tanks had convinced TrainWreck that, as a gang leader, he needed something similar.

And that was especially true since he wanted to expand his gang's territory at the expense of the ABB gang, which had been all-but-destroyed.

Then about a day into that, a phone call had come to TrainWreck from one of his drug suppliers down south in Florida.

He'd said that a sail-powered yacht had just pulled in to the docks at Miami, and was transferring cargo to a train there.

Both were unusual.

There were not many sailing ships out there in the first place - not with Leviathan raiding the seas - and this one was guarded by capes, so the drug supplier assumed this one was bringing drugs from South America.

And another reason to assume that, was because the train was also guarded by capes, and it was armed. Not many trains were still running, but this was the first armed train the drug supplier had ever seen. It had machine-gun turrets on top of every-other train car, with light cannons on top of the rest. The locomotive and caboose had anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles mounted on them.

All that together made TrainWreck's drug supplier assume - with great confidence - that the train would be carrying drugs.

And it was scheduled to head up to Brockton Bay.

The drug supplier had a regular shipment ready to go up to TrainWreck, but its usual transport method would not be ready yet for 2 more days.

So the drug supplier wanted to know if TrainWreck wanted him to sneak TrainWreck's drug shipment onto the train, so TrainWreck could get it early.

He said it would be easy and he had it all figured out: the train was also carrying boring stuff like coconuts, other fruit, and some bales of alligator hides from Florida. He said those things were not watched too closely, and he'd seen a place in the last boxcar on the train, where he could hide his box of drugs until TrainWreck collected it again when it reached Brockton Bay.

TrainWreck said that shipping drugs was often a bit uncertain, so you took what opportunities you could get, and the guy should go for it.

Soon, the guy called back and gave TrainWreck the details on where exactly his box of drugs was hidden.

TrainWreck was excited, since his product arriving earlier meant it would sell earlier, and he'd get the money earlier.

He wanted to 'strike while the iron is hot' and get his tanks done, and in use, while there was still a power-vacuum - primarily from the destruction of the ABB gang, but also from all the other gangs in town having taken damage.

Hearing this, Chariot had offered they could try out his new teleporter.

When that offer was accepted, he spent a while finding the target.

Starting with a map, it was easy to set a small portal high above Miami, and get a picture through it looking down.

Then, using that picture, he found the rail yard, then set another small portal about a thousand feet above it, looking down, to get a new picture.

With that approach, he soon found the right train, then the right boxcar.

Then he made a small portal near the ceiling of that boxcar, looked through that and verified the boxcar currently contained only stuff - no people.

That had also shown him where TrainWreck's drug shipment should be - in a brown cardboard box next to a bale of alligator skins.

He opened a portal by that, reached through, and got the box, then closed the portal.

But when he set it down, he realized he had not one, but two cardboard boxes of similar lengths and widths, but different heights. The tall box had been on top of the short one.

The lower one proved to be TrainWreck's drug shipment, which that cape was very happy to receive.

The upper box was full of ant costumes - 30 of them, made mostly of a strange, thin material, but with some electronics included here and there. There was only one word on the paper inside the box: 'Prototypes'.

They didn't know what to make of them until Chariot, in a moment of whimsy, put a pair of feathery feelers, sprouting from a sort of hat, onto his head.

The moment they'd settled onto his head, Chariot had gained a new sense - he could feel vibrations, mainly in the ground, but also in anything else he touched, and interpret them like a bat interprets sound, to gain a sonar-like sense of his surroundings.

He knew who was where, whether they were standing still or moving, how fast and where they were moving, what they weighed, and much more.

He knew where there were cracks inside the metal plates of the junk tank he was leaning against.

The feelers were clearly TinkerTech, and if the rest of the costumes were as well, this could be a big deal.

But before Chariot could explore that further, his doorbell chimed.

He pulled out his smartphone and checked the doorbell camera. It showed he had a customer waiting for him, carrying the gray shoebox he had suggested as a recognition point.

Chariot had observed TrainWreck when he had advertised for help online. Since hiring capes was illegal, that could not be done directly or in obvious ways.

So they did it with subtle innuendo, circumlocutions, and other sneaky ways.

Chariot wasn't familiar with most of those - not yet - so, though TrainWreck had helped him post his ad on the right website, and phrase it the right way, he'd had no way of accepting payment other than cash.

Cash had meant he'd need to meet at a physical location, to accept it.

So Chariot had bought a new deadbolt and web camera, then gone and found an abandoned apartment building. Finding therein an apartment - number 14 - that would work, he'd installed the deadbolt and doorbell camera, then used that apartment as 'his' address in the ad.

The deadbolt would have been a good idea in any case, since he could not know who may have keys to that apartment, in the unlikely event it still had an intact door lock.

But, as expected, it's door had long ago been kicked-in, destroying the door lock.

That was common.

New capes usually were not thinking clearly just after Triggering. But still, they usually recognized the need for a lair. The combination of those two things resulted in an awful lot of kicked-in doors in various abandoned buildings.

In fact, each new cape - the ones that survived that is - usually kicked in several doors, as they changed lairs several times, before figuring out why the stuff they'd left in their previous lair had been stolen.

There were many homeless in town, all of whom had plenty of time on their hands for exploring and finding a warm dry place to sleep.

Any newly kicked-in door was a new option for some homeless person to stay the night in.

In fact, places with newly kicked-in doors were their preferred option, partly since a few of them had not been looted yet after being abandoned, but mostly since most such places would have a set of clothes at least, plus maybe some food, weapons, medical supplies or whatever else the new cape thought he may need and so stashed in 'his' new lair.

Many homeless around town ended up wearing all or part of a cape's costume, thus complicating and confusing the government's attempts to track the movements and actions of capes.

Many homeless also ended up wearing jeans and hoodies, since that was the go-to option for a new cape who wasn't thinking and wanted a costume.

But the classic 'black jeans and hoodie' cape costume, while it had a very broad buy-in at first, usually didn't stay popular with capes for very long. Sure it was easy, comfortable, and durable, and at least minimally effective at concealing your identity - at least, as long as the local lighting and security-camera angles happened to favor you.

But most capes stopped wearing hoodies and upgraded to better costumes at about the time they lost their first fight due to the drawbacks of the hoodie.

Hoodies severely restricted your peripheral vision, and tended to flop around, meaning that, in a fight, where you needed to move suddenly and vigorously in various directions, you had a very good chance of the hoodie either flopping open and revealing your identity, or flopping closed and blocking even more of your vision.

And canny opponents realized that and could easily use it against you, by, for example, moving so as to use your own hoodie to blind you at the right moment.

Fighting against both an opponent, and against your own hoodie, was enough of a disadvantage that many new capes lost that first fight.

And doing so was a bad enough experience that, most if not all, of the capes who survived it, immediately changed to something other than a hoodie.

Chariot had not left anything - hoodie or otherwise - in apartment 14. He had added the deadbolt as part of an effort to make sure nobody was already in there when he went there.

So Chariot, on seeing his visitor in his webcam, had said to TrainWreck, "these costumes are TinkerTech - you should check them out while I go meet with an unexpected visitor at my apartment."

Then he opened a teleport portal to apartment 14, went through, closed it, and answered the door.

The man in the dark suit and shades who was standing there knew the drill - the same drill that TrainWreck had coached Chariot in.

The man said, "I was passing by and saw this box on your doorstep, is it yours?"

Then he lifted the lid on the gray shoebox, displaying the cash inside - small denominations, in neatly wrapped bundles labeled with amounts and totaling the amount Chariot had hinted at for the price for his services.

"Why yes, it is mine, thanks," Chariot replied.

"Can you prove it?" the visitor with the box asked.

"No, sorry, if have no proof that it is mine. But thanks for being so careful, and for seeing that I had somehow left it outside unattended. I really appreciate it. I want to do you a favor to show my appreciation. Is there any kind of favor that you need?"

"Why yes," the man in the dark suit replied, "as it happens, there is something I could really use help with. I imagine it would take you only about an hour, if you are willing."

"Come inside and let's talk details," a grinning Chariot replied.

"Absolutely," the man grinned, "and your kind nature makes it clear you would not be the type of person who would lie about ownership of the box, so don't worry about proof, let me return it to you."

And with that, both had said all the things they needed to for their own protection in the event that the other was an undercover cop. So they proceeded inside to get down to the real negotiations, now that legal fictions were taken care of.

It turned out that the dark suited man was going by the name of Fritz, though Chariot guessed that wasn't his real name.

Fritz had some big heavy things that he wanted moved across long distances, and was hoping that Chariot could do that, since it would save him weeks over the other method he had available to him.

It turned out that Chariot could indeed do that.

Fritz made arrangements, and then Chariot opened a portal to an old military warehouse in Germany.

There they met a cape known as Cloudy, who then touched a shipping container and turned himself and it into thin wispy clouds.

Several men were busy loading other shipping containers with small cannons and other things, but Chariot pretended not to notice that and opened a return portal as he was directed.

The return portal took them back to Brockton Bay, to a warehouse a few miles north of the town.

Chariot, Cloudy, and Fritz all stepped through into the warehouse, and the wispy cloud that had been the shipping container came along with them, in Cloudy's hand.

Cloudy set down the shipping container, released it, and let it turn back into solid matter again.

"There you go - a successful test!," exulted Chariot, "What's next?"

It turned out that what was next was another dozen trips just like the first.

Nine of those trips were with shipping containers.

The other three trips were with huge steel turrets, each sprouting 3 guns that had to be almost 50 feet long. Each turret sat atop a tall, thick steel cylinder, and had to weigh...lots. Chariot had no comparable experience from which to judge it.

Though he did see a small plaque on one that said "Battlecruiser Scharnhorst".

He pretended to pay no attention to that, or anything else.

Despite the massive size of the 3 turrets,Cloudy had no trouble turning them into wispy clouds, or walking, with them, through Chariot's portal into a warehouse near Brockton Bay.

Each turret went to it's own warehouse.

And each one got carefully placed into some kind of framework of metal girders. They got positioned just-so in the massive frameworks - which had obviously been built for them and fitted just right for that - before Cloudy turned them solid again.

They did not make any more portals or trips to the three warehouses that held the turrets. The rest of the shipping containers went to the warehouse where they had put the first shipping container.

After setting down the last shipping container Cloudy gave Chariot a business card with a phone number and email address, said ,"It's been a pleasure, I hope we can do business again." and stepped back through the portal to Germany.

Fritz gave Chariot a business card too, said much the same thing, and, far more importantly, also gave Chariot his box of money, then let him go.

Chariot had been a little worried this would end up as one of those cases where they'd try to kill all involved so nobody could talk.

That happened all the time in movies.

But, he supposed, you could not do that much in real life, or you'd quickly end up with no resources left who could get things done for you.

It might have helped that, because he was doing cape things, he was in his cape costume, which was a battlesuit. One of the first things for any battlesuit was to be bulletproof, and that would have complicated any plans Fritz may have had to keep him silent.

Still, if Fritz had wanted him dead, there had been plenty of ways despite the battlesuit.

So it was probably the 'don't kill off your resources or you will run out' thing, and that thought cheered Chariot. It meant Fritz was rational, and that meant he could be dealt with again.

But in the short term, the next thing on Chariot's agenda was to keep his money safe.

This was a dangerous town, with people getting robbed, or worse, all the time, both by regular people, but also by super-villains.

So walking around with a shoebox full of cash, even though it was all in small bills, was just asking to lose that,cash, and possibly his life as well.

But Chariot had an exceptionally good option available to him as far as securing cash went.

Apartment 14 had a walk-in closet off the main bedroom. That closet was empty but for a small amount of trash, but more importantly, it was without any windows and had an intact door, so nobody could observe Chariot if he went in and shut the door, which he did.

Then he took out his teleportation portal gun, set both ends of a new portal to be right in front of him, then used the control panel on it - which looked like, and indeed included, a cell phone - to start 'scrolling down' for the far end of the portal.

As he scrolled, the far end of the portal went downwards, to and through the floor, descending a few feet for each 'swipe' of his finger.

The near end of the portal stayed next to Chariot, and constantly changed to show what the far end was next to. First it showed a window into the rest of this room in the apartment. Then it showed carpet, floor-joists and then cement as the portal descended through these. Then it showed dirt.

He had built this function in for making fine adjustments, and it certainly wasn't the way he usually set the portal ends.

Chariot kept scrolling down through the dirt, until he finally reached rock. The control panel said that was 78 feet underneath him.

He scrolled down through the rock for 10 feet, then back up a couple feet, and did some side-to-side scrolling, to make sure the rock was solid and big enough.

It looked like solid granite to him, and he smiled.

Then he positioned the far end of the portal within the rock 86 feet below him, with solid rock at least 2 feet in all directions from it.

He left it there and deployed one of the tools built into his battlesuit.

He was a Tinker, and Tinkers both need tools and sometimes need to do some repairs or other tinkering while out in costume.

Plus the battlesuit was stronger than he was, so some construction projects - such as helping TrainWreck build tanks - went faster if he was wearing his battlesuit.

So he deployed an angle-grinder and started using it, through the portal, to cut into the rock 86 feet below him.

He cut a square, with two vertical cuts and two more horizontal. Then he adjusted the portal, made another cut, then repeated that for a 6th cut, which completed all 6 sides of a rectangular shape he was cutting out, about the size of a cinder-block.

Then he pried at that to break out the cinder-block-sized chunk inside all those cuts.

It was a little stuck, since the angle-grinder's shape meant that the corners where cuts met were still attached by little bits of solid rock.

But a few minutes of beating on it and prying at it finally broke it loose, and then Chariot had the perfect 'safe' for his money.

To reach it, someone would have to dig down through 78 feet of dirt, then 8 feet of rock, even if they knew it was there.

And there were no signs at all that it was there... except a chunk of rock the size of a cinder-block and a lot of rock dust generated by his angle-grinder.

That would not do, so he closed that portal so he could open another.

Then he opened a portal that went from wall to wall, and from floor to ceiling in his walk-in closet, with it's near side just beyond the dust, and its far side 10 miles out to sea.

He tossed the chunk of rock through the portal and it splashed into the ocean.

Then he carefully turned on the jetpack built into his battlesuit, just barely enough to hover a foot off the ground.

Then he carefully used the blast of wind from the jetpack's nozzles to blow all the dust in the room, plus the miscellaneous litter that was there, out to sea. When he was done, he tossed two small chunks of rock that had broken off the corners of his 'safe' through the portal as well.

There. Now there were no signs of what he'd done.

He closed the portal that went out to sea and re-opened the one that went to his 'safe' in the rock underground.

Chariot smiled, took out just a little spending money, then put the shoebox into the hole he'd just carved into the rock, after wrapping it in a convenient plastic shopping bag he'd kept, in case there was any seepage through the rock.

He would upgrade that to zip-lock bags later, just in case. It wouldn't do to have all that nice cash get soaked and turn into mush.

Then he carefully noted the coordinates of his 'safe', and tried to memorize them. But not trusting just that, he also put them in his cell phone, disguised as the phone number of a friend.

Then he removed the coordinates of his safe from the control panel on his teleport gun, so in case it was captured and figured out, people could not just scroll through old locations and find his money.

Then it was time to get back to TrainWreck and resume work there.

Chariot made a portal to the abandoned warehouse within the Merchant gang territory where he had been working with TrainWreck at building tanks out of whatever miscellaneous junk could be scrounged.

His first thought on arrival was that somehow the place had turned into a mutant ant hive.

Everything was organized now, instead of being in semi-chaotic piles.

And there were man-sized ants walking around on two legs. No, on looking again more carefully, there were gang members wearing ant costumes, not actual ants. It was a little hard to tell, both because the costumes were really good, and because of the things being done by those wearing the costumes.

Some were walking on walls or on the ceiling - though only if they had a purpose in doing so, like working on something tall without needing a ladder.

And many were carrying several times their own body weight as if it was nothing.

While Chariot was still watching the scene with amazement, TrainWreck saw him and came over.

"Big difference in just the hour or so you were gone, eh?" he asked.

"That could be the understatement of the year," Chariot replied. "It looks like you've done a week's worth of work, at least. You and the regular workers seem to be doing about the same as before, except for the 30 guys wearing ant costumes. Clearly those costumes have more TinkerTech powers than just the one I stumbled across. I can see some are pretty obvious, but what are the others?"

"That's a long list - every piece of the costume gives something different. Where to start?" TrainWreck mused.

He pointed at some folks on the ceiling, "The gloves and booties are what gives the power to walk on walls and ceilings. And not only do they stick to them, they don't get disoriented either!"

He flexed his biceps, "the bodysuit is what gives them super-strength. It isn't enough to pick up a car, but two together can do that."

He continued, 'and you'd think they'd get tired of all that heavy carrying, but the long sleeves and leggings gives them great endurance. They just don't seem to get tired at all."

He put his battlesuit's hands - TrainWreck always wore his battlesuit and so it was easy to get into the habit of thinking of its hands as his hands - up by his head and extended two fingers like antennae, "the antennae let them work together in perfect synchronization. And you wouldn't believe how coordination like that speeds up the work!"

He moved his hands a bit lower, "The feelers you know - they give that extra sense for using vibrations like sonar."

His hands moved again, "and the big bug eyes give really good vision."

Then he grinned and moved his hands to the sides of his mouth and said, "but the pincers or mandibles or whatever you call them are maybe the biggest help of all! Those pincers cut anything - like super-sharp scissors but with really good control. So these guys can just walk up to a piece of scrap like an old junk car or fishing trawler, size it up with that great vision, know which parts are sound with that vibration sonar, know exactly what the other workers need due to that synchronization, then lean in and snip snip - just like that they've cut out the right bit, shaped exactly as needed. The cuts don't have ragged edges, or melt marks, or any of the usual minor complications like that. It's awesome!"

"Fun too," said a passing ant - or rather, a passing gang member in an ant costume.

Chariot was once again amazed at how much more lucid and sane most of the gang members were over the last few days. It had really revitalized the gang.

And, even more than that, he was glad to see that the costumes didn't give their wearers insect-minds or anything like that.

"By the way," TrainWreck added with a smirk, "break-time is over Chariot - you are way behind the other workers all of a sudden. Get moving. I'm not paying you to chat." He winked playfully to show it was said in fun - mostly.

So Chariot got back to work, helping to build tanks out of whatever they could scrounge.

Tanks were essentially 3 things: mobility, protection, and firepower.

Chariot specialized in mobility tinkering.

He got to use scrounged engines, transmissions, etc, to build something that would support armor and guns - handled by someone other than him - and haul it all around a battlefield.

He looked at the neat piles of parts the ant-costumed workers had made for him.

This was a lot better than before he'd left, where there had been no organization to it all, and he had to remember where each part was.

Now he had separate piles for functioning engines, engines that could be repaired, and engines just there for parts. And all the piles were in lines, organized from highest horsepower output to lowest.

His transmissions, linkages, steering apparatus etc were also organized like that.

Costumed ants were bringing in more scrounged parts, much faster than Chariot could use them.

But that was OK, because other costumed ants were ready to act according to his direction - he just had to tell them which parts to put together with which other ones, and they could do all the non-specialized work that didn't require a Tinker's personal involvement.

And they worked faster for several reasons, such as their not needing cranes to lift things and hold them in place.

Chariot dove into his work with gusto.

They worked for half a day before more help arrived.

TrainWreck had managed to hire PyroTechnical and Glace from ToyBox - the mercenary group of Tinkers that managed to hire themselves out openly despite that being illegal.

PyroTechnical's Tinker specialty was guns and fire, flame, heat and anything to do with those. Guns obviously had direct application to TrainWreck's project, which was why TrainWreck had reached out to him.

But PyroTechnical, on seeing their project, said he couldn't do as much as TrainWreck had hoped. TrainWreck had wanted laser weapons, heat-rays, and plasma guns, all of which PyroTechnical could build and get working,but only if he had enough electrical power to run them.

Those types of weapons required lots of electrical power, and there just wasn't that much available from old, re-purposed truck engines and similar.

Chariot could improve on the power output of those engines, but he was already spread pretty thin just getting the things to run at all.

TrainWreck wanted the tank-building project done sooner than that. Besides, TrainWreck wasn't just a junk Tinker, he was also a steam Tinker, and so had been itching to make steam-powered things: engines, guns, whatever he could.

And there, PyroTechnical could help. He had a quick simple design for a small object that generated tremendous heat. He called it a fire catalyst, and when it was present, pretty much any fuel burned completely and released far more energy than normal fires did.

TrainWreck saw that it could be the central element in a powerful steam engine - all they'd need is a strong pressure vessel to contain the steam and some moving parts all of which TrainWreck could make, plus a potent source of cold to run the re-condenser.

And that is where Glace came in. Her Tinker specialty was in generating cold and freezing things.

It didn't take long, with PyroTechnical, TrainWreck, and Glace working together, before they had a steam engine that was more compact than a regular diesel engine with otherwise comparable weight and other specifications. But the steam engine had twice the power, and yet could burn almost anything as fuel.

It could both move their tanks along faster than the other engines they'd been making, and provide, at the same time, enough electrical energy to run the various specialized guns that PyroTechnical would also be happy to build for this project.

Then those three got to work making several of those special TinkerTech steam engines.

That left Chariot free to work on other aspects of making the tanks move, which helped him get caught up.

A day and a half later, Chariot's part in the project was done.

TrainWreck had the number of tanks he'd wanted - they do require maintenance and so he could only support so many. Those tanks still needed TrainWreck to finish the armor on some of them. Even more needed PyroTechnical to finish their guns.

But an exhausted Chariot could finally go home.

He could go home, but he planned to only stay there long enough to shower, eat, and convince his family and friends to get out of town with him for a while.

He'd just spent nearly a week helping two groups arm for war, and he didn't want to be here when that war came.

-0-0-0-

It was time for HMS Agamemnon to leave Mars Colony in Dimension 1, and head back to Brockton Bay on Earth-Bet to collect the trainload of food they'd ordered.

So, in orbit above Mars, they opened a dimensional portal to Dimension 29, where Earth-Bet was, and flew through it.

Then a second's worth of the star drive brought them to a point between Earth and it's moon.

There they contacted the people Lisa had had working in the moon base. Then with two quick teleportation portals, they collected the moon workers, then deposited them on Earth.

Another brief touch of the star drive brought them to orbit above Earth-Bet.

Then, in one of life's ironies, they started the shortest leg of the trip in terms of distance, which would take them by far the longest in terms of time. It would take them 4 hours to descend the 100 miles to the planet's surface. In space, they could fly at 1000 times the speed of light. But in atmosphere,their maximum speed was 25 miles per hour.

"Tell me again why we are landing at all? These people are crazy, and there's at least two different ways we could pick up a boxcar from orbit." Ron asked.

"Battleships are built for battling," Boz answered. "Sure, we can do other things too, but battling is what we are best at and battling evil - or, as you like to put it, a paladin-like quest - is what we set out to do in the first place. There is plenty of evil here to fight, but if we stay in orbit, it is harder for them to identify themselves to us."

Colonel Harry, one of the Old Codgers Abe had known from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, piped up, "It's like my Captain used to say when he was asked why we maintained a military presence in certain hostile foreign countries. Son, he'd say, there are folks here that want to kill us. You and I are right in front of them to attract their attention, because you and I are trained, equipped, and prepared for that, and ready to respond in kind. They can come at us all they like, but they'll get smacked down when they do, removing some of the problem people and teaching others not to try it. Would you rather they travel to our country and there try to kill civilians who are not prepared for it?"

"it's not as simple as that"

"True, it never is. no matter how detailed your analysis is, there are always some special cases, exceptions and such which were not analyzed as carefully as they could have been. Still, it's is a useful summary." Harry concluded.

"We can't take down All the bad guys here - there are too many."

"True," Boz replied, "but every one that we can take down makes this place that much the better-off when we leave."

"Which is why I still say you should relax our Rules of Engagement." Harry groused. "Think of how many more bad guys we could burn from orbit, as we descend, if you didn't make us verify so many things first."

Boz was stern, "No. I don't want to risk burning someone who is inclined to hurt others but resisting that urge. That possibility exists, as far as we know. Later, we may alter things after we get more experience and learn to squeeze more insights out of our detection consoles. But for now it will remain the case that a target has to show up at least two-thirds of the way up the scale on the Detect Affinity for Hurting Others Console, as well as on the Detect Hostile Intent Console, with that hostile intent showing as being directed at someone near them. Then they still have to be observed with the visual scanners to verify they are in the act of committing a crime. In those circumstances, go ahead and burn them down. Otherwise, hold off."

"Aye aye, Sir" Harry acknowledged dutifully. He didn't hesitate to push where he thought boundaries should be pushed, but he also respected the chain of command and stopped pushing once a decision was firm and clear.

Suddenly he smiled, as one of the ships lasers fired and the group of Old Codgers huddled around some of the Visual Scanner monitors whooped and put another hash-mark on a chalkboard.

The chalkboard was labeled "Making the world a better place, one zap at a time."

"That really bothered me, at first," Beth offered, looking a little green and ill. "Burning people from orbit just seemed wrong and inexcusable. But then I took a good look at those screens you guys are checking for target verification. The visuals shown on them..."

She gulped and turned a little greener.

After a moment, she continued in a quiet voice, "The cruelty those guys are showing as they murder, rape and..."

She paused a moment, then continued in a near-whisper. "And they way they laugh as they do it..."

She shook herself, then declared loudly and firmly, "Burn the bastards!"

"Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent" Colonel Harry agreed. "Every one of these scum that we burn is several more crimes prevented. And those who would have been their victims would thank us if they could"

It was statements like that which had caused Boz to scan him, and indeed, all the Old Codgers, twice with the Detect Affinity for Hurting Others Console, just in case the results varied according to mood, or if some folks had some way to hide it sometimes.

But no, the results were consistent.

Though the Old Codgers frequently sounded bloodthirsty, they actively disliked hurting others. They just didn't shy away from it at all when they felt it was needed.

The two detection consoles showed lots of candidates, so the Old Codgers were running ten different video displays to help sort out which candidates could be vaporized from orbit.

Some of the candidates did not show clear enough evidence to justify being burned to dust by a laser, yet were still involved in something they ought not do.

These often got flung into a nearby lake, pond or swimming-pool by the ship's telekinesis.

When the tk console was busy, then the Old Codgers got creative with the Gravity Control Console - using it to slam perpetrators into nearby walls or ceilings at two to four gravities.

And so it went as the HMS Agamemnon descended towards Brockton Bay.

The ship could have simply descended in a straight line downwards towards the bay, since it could fly and therefore did not need to pay attention to the way things were usually done with rockets.

But in this case they'd elected to let the Earth pass beneath then as they descended. This was done mainly by choosing what speed they were going as they entered the atmosphere, which just took a little math.

So they started their descent over the West Coast of the USA, and by the time they reached sea-level, it would be Brockton Bay underneath them.

That let the whole country pass beneath them, so they could choose the worst people down there as targets to be zapped by lasers from above.

"How can you keep watching those screens and the horrible acts shown on them?" Beth asked them at one point, as they passed about 60 miles high over Kansas.

Colonel Harry, who, as the highest ranking Old Codger had sort of naturally fallen into the role of being their spokesman, looked up from the betting pool they'd been running for betting on zap totals, and said "Offensive, isn't it? When you look at people doing some of those things to their victims, something in your soul cries out - positively screams - for justice. And that's one thing that makes it easier to bear - that we are dispensing justice as quick as we can. Also, it helps to know that watching this is the price we must pay to be sure we zap the right guys. Not being sure would be worse. And this is what we signed up for - a chance to stop the bad guys. Lastly we'll use that Reset chemical in your hospital to help clean out the last of the trauma of having watched this horror." he gestured at a screen where some sicko had been herding children into an alligator pen. As they watched, the sicko, as well as the alligators, all got burned by lasers, which then carefully cut their kindergarten teacher free of the pole where she'd been tied, forced to watch. A moment later, a missile full of Reset burst above all the people at that alligator pen. Then the screen got switched to the next candidate.

"Of course," he added, "we may have to wait in line for the hospital, which is keeping pretty busy healing up the victims that need it."

Beth shuddered and muttered, "I'll be standing in that line for some Reset too."

Harry just nodded.

The ship's crew stayed busy as they descended.

All the consoles having to do with detecting things were busy.

And the lasers stayed intermittently busy too.

After they'd descended a certain amount, the lasers no longer had direct line-of-sight on certain targets.

They could still have used the ship's cannons, except that they all had flight times for their shells which could allow, over the distances involved, the target to move, and possibly survive dispite the blast-radius. And that blast-radius became a problem in cases where there were hostages.

After some discussion, they settled on launching two Replicated shuttles, each crewed by Replicated robots. The robots would receive target coordinates from the ship, and then use the lasers built in to the shuttles to burn the target from orbit.

Most of the targets they zapped, whether capes or not, died from a single laser hit.

The local capes did not often have a well-rounded set of powers, including offense, defense, mobility, and utility.

No, usually they just had one or two tricks and that was it.

But there were those with good defenses, and some of them were scum such as the Agamemnon was targeting.

Above eastern Ohio, they ran across one such. That sicko took a hit from the laser, then started regenerating.

So they hit him next with a particle beam, both as a test, and to buy time.

He regenerated from that too.

But just before he was quite done regenerating, a special round fired from a Bofors 40mm cannon hit him.

Grandpa Issac had included some 'canister' rounds for his guns, including the small 40mm ones. These were hollow shells with a detonator and optional small bursting charge. They could be loaded with things like Napalm, or chemicals, in order to deliver those to a target and spread them around.

Boz had found that it was possible to make some of the bombs captured from Bakuda fit into these canister rounds.

He had prepared a few types, then scanned them into the Replicator for easy Replication at need.

So the regenerating sicko got hit by a 40m canister round containing a Bakuda bomb that turned all living things into glass.

He turned into a glass statue of himself, and that was it for him - his regeneration did not help him.

The pool furniture next to him were unaffected, including the pole he had been using to hold a woman underwater in the course of drowning her.

A follow-on laser cut that pole and freed the woman, who then surfaced and breathed in some air containing Reset from another airburst 40mm shell.

And so it went - zapping bad guys as they descended towards Brockton Bay.