Chapter 17

"The crowd is moving now," Beth's voice said in the ears of all of Wave 2, "they have a few bazookas, and some...silly looking guns... hang on... The Captain says those are paintball guns, which means the paintballs will be loaded with something they expect to be effective against armor, like acid or explosives. Anyway, the crowd isn't moving with any kind of cohesion or direction - some are going one way, some another. Some fast, most slow, and some are just standing around. Hang on..."

There was a pause, then Beth's voice came back. "Dinah says this gang is all drug dealers, and all addicted to what they sell, and so their odd behavior probably means most of them are stoned. Still, they just might chance to fire something in the right direction at the right time. And the four capes Dinah identified as Skidmark, Squealer, Mush, and Trainwreck are all acting like they know what to do and how to do it. They're all moving purposefully in various directions. Squealer has the only thing that is clearly a threat - that 18-wheeler truck frame covered in guns that I already told you about. The two battlesuits, Mush and Trainwreck, most likely have augmented strength, but aren't much bigger than regular human sizes, so I don't think they can do what Menja and Fenja did. And they don't have obvious anti-tank weapons built into their suits. Dinah says that Skidmark would need to use his super-power to make multiple acceleration fields layered on top of each-other in order to have it be strong enough to move one of our tanks, so just don't drive over ground that is glowing blue - that's the tell-tale of his power."

She continued to describe, and update, the situation to the folks in the armored column as they drove on - for the moment, continuing to go straight ahead into the ambush.

Seconds later, four of the big twelve-inch shells burst in a box pattern over their area of the city, covering the whole area in smoke.

Four 9.2 inch shells then did similarly, but used chemical rounds to try to exhaust and nauseate everyone near the ambush site.

Then the armored column, under cover of the smoke, turned right onto Dogwood street, went a block, and turned left again onto 20th street to continue towards the nearby shore where their ferry boats awaited them.

Ron-9 made, and maintained, the illusion of one King Tiger tank driving along their original route. He did it in hopes of getting the enemy to split their forces and waste some of their efforts. They'd discovered that the illusions included not just sight, but also sound and thermal components. So the enemy would be able to hear the 'tank' on 19th street, and even see it if they had any infra-red sensors.

Suddenly Beth announced, to the command center and to Wave 2 over the Communication Console, "They're reacting! The 18-wheeler calliope gun truck just pulled out of the warehouse it was hiding in. Squealer and Skidmark are in the cab and it's moving east fast. It looks like they want to get ahead of us."

Boz ordered "Ron-5, pull the King Tiger to the front of the column, alongside the Tiger G there, then all continue on at best speed. And lets get more smoke out in front of them, even though they clearly have some sensors that can detect the tanks, they may not have many."

Simon fired more smoke shells from the battleship's big guns, even as Beth was giving another update.

She said "A couple dozen little toy trains have left the buildings around where they expected to ambush us and are now moving east as well. Each of the little steam engines is pulling a few cars that seem to be loaded with some payload."

"Probably explosives." Basil guessed.

While still looking at a map, he said "Combat robot #2 has a fully-automatic 40mm grenade-launcher, have it pause when it gets to Honey Locust street, wait...5 seconds, then start hosing grenades at the intersection of Honey Locust and 19th a block away from it. That ought to catch the little trains in the grenade explosions. Even if the shrapnel doesn't disable them, the blasts should at least knock them off their wheels."

Beth nodded and sent the instructions, adding "very few gang members are still anywhere near being combat effective. Most have just sat down or laid down where they were. I've lost track of the two battlesuit capes, though I think one went into a tall apartment building - the one that's starting to collapse..."

"Whoah! Update," she interrupted herself, "The 18-wheeler just put on an amazing burst of speed. It will be 3 blocks ahead of the armored column by the time I finish saying this, and...Wow! It just made an impossible right turn at full speed onto Redwood street. The ground is glowing blue, so we know Skidmark helped with that somehow."

Captain Boz was quietly giving orders while she spoke.

As the 18-wheeler gun-calliope truck came into the intersection with 20th street, the armored column fired at its broad side with all their guns.

Blue acceleration fields appeared by the truck's side and the bullets and shells veered aside and missed, whether they were comparatively small machine-gun bullets, or larger, they all missed, from 20 or 25mm autocannons up and including the tank's 88 and 105mm main gun rounds.

The calliope fired back, it's whole side seeming to explode in fire and smoke as hundreds of all kinds of guns went off at once.

The lasers and particle beams on the tanks were still set to automatically shoot as fast-moving incoming threats such as missiles. So they shot down a couple recoilless rifle rounds, but did not fire at the calliope truck.

The Deflection Console in the King Tiger, manned by Ron-9, was still set at default, where it would focus on fast-moving threats, since it took very high-velocity rounds to penetrate the tank's armor. So that is what it highlighted to Ron-9 and that is what he deflected, and a 120mm recoilless rifle round that had been headed for the tanks, ricocheted back and hit the rear part of the calliope instead. That was the part not currently covered by an acceleration field, which was why Ron-9 had aimed for it.

The 120mm round penetrated the forest of gun barrels and the mess of machinery behind them, wrecking a dozen gun and some equipment as it passed through.

That did some damage, but the twin particle beams contributed by combat robot #1 did more.

They hit the truck's cab, with one cutting right through the engine, and the other cutting off the front wheels.

The nose of the 18-wheeler dug into the pavement, and the truck stopped so fast it briefly looked like it would flip end-over-0end.

As the truck settled in place, an egg-shaped escape pod shot out of the far side of the truck's cab, through a nearby building, and out of sight.

All of this left the relatively slow-moving projectiles from the big circus cannons unmolested, So they flew to their targets mostly as planned, as did most of the other bullets and shells from the calliope.

Thousands of miscellaneous bullets from the calliope hit the tanks and mostly achieved nothing but to strip off a few of the less well-protected attachments such as cameras, smoke grenade-launchers, and items of spare equipment.

Some of the storm of bullets missed the tanks and hit the follow-on vehicles, which were mostly, but not entirely, shielded by the two tanks in front of them.

And some of the bullets that hit the tanks, or other things like buildings, then ricocheted down the street, hitting other things as well, including vehicles.

The 10-wheeler truck got thoroughly shredded, and the Duplicates in the truck cab got dismissed due to damage taken.

The LAV-25's had armor designed to shrug off what the army called "small-arms fire" - everything from light or even medium machine-guns on down to pistols.

And that was before the armor had been upgraded to composite armor by Issac Fields.

So the LAV-25's mostly just got their external attachments - sensor pickups, headlights, smoke launchers etc - sheared off like the tanks had.

But they also got their rubber tires popped, and shredded - nearly all of them. Each LAV had 8 tires, but only one tire here and two there survived intact.

The military had developed a system for some vehicles - and Issac Fields had included it on these - that re-inflated damaged tires. But the damage from the calliope was, in most cases, beyond what that special tire system could help with.

The circus cannon that had fired Mush missed the Tiger it had aimed at, and hit near an LAV instead. Mush got up next to that vehicle, shook his head to clear it, and started swinging a large fire-axe, reversed so the narrow, pick-like point would hit first.

The big results of the calliope were from the recoilless rifle rounds that got through to the tanks, as well as from the other circus cannon.

Two dozen recoilless rifles, arranged in ascending order of size as they should be in a pipe organ or calliope, all fired at the Tiger G tank.

The range was so close that they all hit.

Recoilless rifles have lower velocity shells, in general, than cannon with similarly-sized bores. That means they don't hit as hard, but that's seen as an acceptable trade-off for being easy to mount on almost anything: even a jeep could mount a 75mm recoilless rifle - a size that, for a regular cannon, would normally require something like a medium tank.

And these recoilless rifles - even the biggest ones - were smaller than the 127 mm glass-dragon cannons that had shot these tanks earlier at the original objective.

So, even though 5 shells from those glass cannons had been enough to knock down a Tiger G's force-field, it took 10 of these recoilless rifle rounds to do so.

Then the other 14 hit the tank's thickened composite armor, and chewed their way in .

The hits from 75mm recoilless rifles bounced off without any damage, except where they hit armor that was already damaged.

The hits from 90mm, 105mm, and 120mm recoilless rifles did progressively more.

The 90mm hits bounced off, leaving quarter-inch dents in the armor.

The 105mm hits bounced off, leaving dents in the armor that varied between half-inch, to one inch.

And the 120mm hits sort-of splashed, leaving 1-2 inch deep craters in the armor.

The front armor on the lead Tiger G tank was thoroughly chewed up - in some cases all the way down to the final layer of tungsten armor.

But the tank withstood the attack.

The King Tiger next to it was not so lucky.

It got hit by a 20-gallon glob of Thermite gel cooked up by a chemistry Tinker, and fired out of a circus cannon.

The glob splashed all across the front of the tank, ignited, and burned through rapidly.

Ron-3, in the lead Tiger G, was just recovering from all the noise of their tank being hit, and was saying "wow - did we actually survive all those hits..." when the King Tiger next to them exploded.

Beth spoke quickly, "Tank 3, you have a glob of that flammable chemical on the side of your tank, splashed there from the King Tiger. It's about half a gallon and has not yet ignited."

She put a close-up of it onto the command center's ceiling display. Then the heat from the still-burning King Tiger tank ignited the glob on the side of the Tiger G next to it.

Ron wryly answered Ron-3's question aloud so everyone could hear it, "No Ron-3, you didn't survive all those hits. That glob is right over your ammo rack, and looks like it will burn through in a minute or so."

While Ron had been speaking, The crew of tank 3 has been busy.

That Duplicate of Boz had switched from the primary capacitor to the back-up, and told Abe to fire the disintegrator.

He explained "the force-field couldn't help us now even if we restored it, but we can at least carve a passage through the road-block that the calliope has become. That way at least the other vehicles won't be trapped.

And while he and Abe-3 were doing that, Ron-3 had been scrambling out of the tank.

While he was moving, Beth announced "Incoming! Giant robot to the rear! He looks like a much bigger version of Trainwreck, and must have come out of that collapsing 6-story building."

All eyes, and some gun turrets, swiveled to the rear, as a 50 foot tall powersuit wielding a huge pick-axe in each hand took the last couple long strides to get to the rear Tiger G, then swung both pickaxes at it.

The first pick-axe glanced off the force-field surrounding the tank, but also overloaded it and the force-field shut off.

The second pick-axe hit the tank's engine-deck, and went right through both armor, and engine, destroying the engine and getting stuck in the process.

25mm shells from 3 LAV'25's hit all over Trainwreck's 50 foot tall powersuit, but failed to penetrate it's armor.

A second later, Simon-3 fired the lead tank's main gun at Trainwreck's huge powersuit, hitting it in the right arm. The 88mm shell tore through the powersuit's outer armor and exploded within the arm's inner mechanisms, leaving the ruined wreck of the arm dangling by some cables and damaged linkages.

The powersuit had been struggling to free the pick-axe held by that arm, and, with it's grip suddenly released, stumbled back a step.

The rear tank had been too close to the huge powersuit to use its main gun. The 88mm cannon's long barrel had tapped it's side against the powersuit's legs, and stopped.

Now the gun could be brought to bear, but, without an engine, the tank's crew had to manually traverse the turret, to swing the gun around and get it pointed at the enemy.

They were still working on that when Ron-3 got in position for a desperate gamble to save the lead tank. If he could get it just right, his disintegrator pistol could, at least in theory, be turned on just long enough to disintegrate only the thermite burning through the tank.

To time it just right, so the thermite, but not the armor behind it, would be disintegrated, he'd have liked to have the assistance of the Cheating Consoles, as he liked to call them.

It wouldn't even take the Probability Control Console's whole power to effectively guarantee him success.

He'd tried to call in that request, but everyone was too busy just now, and no one heard in the time he had available.

So he gave it his best guess, and briefly pulled the trigger. The burning thermite disintegrated into powder, as did the armor behind it, and part of the first shell in the ammo-rack.

Then the first post-disintegration lightning burst happened, and tank 3 exploded.

At the rear of the column, the giant powersuit was still staggering - now under two hits to its right leg from combat robot #1's particle beams, which cut through armor and the mechanisms underneath as well.

Then tank 4 finally got it's turret hand-cranked around, and fired into the powersuit's head, blowing the right cheek off.

The powersuit fell backwards, crashing through the top two floors of a building and settling there, unmoving.

Combat Robot #1 fired at the prone powersuit once more, to make sure it would stay down, and judging by the resulting explosion, must have hit some natural gas tanks.

Silence fell over the command center, broken only by the sounds of small bits of tank and powersuit, blown high into the air by explosions, now falling and hitting the ground.

Ron spoke for all of them, "And as quickly as that, It's all over? From everything happening everywhere at once to sudden quiet?"

"Odd how things can work out, isn't it?" Simon offered.

Boz was all business, "Wave 2, check your vehicles over so we can get moving again. The shore is only 6 blocks away."

tink

"The tires are mostly shredded, none of the vehicles can move," Ron complained.

tink

"You ended your sentence too early there," Boz said. "You meant to say 'none of the vehicles can move without damaging the wheel rims'. That is true, but what do we care about damage to Replicated vehicles. Let the wheel rims get dented and bent - they just have to move the vehicles 6 blocks."

tink

"Point," Ron conceded. "The LAVs' engines, transmissions etc are behind intact armor, so they can drive. But the truck is shot...literally. The only thing that's going to move it is a tow-truck."

tink

"Or telekinesis from the ship," Boz grinned. "We just have to get it to the ferries. And some of its contents may still be intact. I'd like to find out and the cost to do so, is low."

tink

"What is that 'tink' noise?" Boz looked up from the Telekinesis Console and demanded.

It was just a moment before Beth found it, and put it on the main screen.

Mush, in his battlesuit, was still swinging a fire-axe - reversed so it hit point first instead of blade-first - onto LAV #1. The narrow point on the rear part of the fire-axe concentrated quite a bit of force on one spot, and so sometimes Mush was penetrating the armor and leaving a small hole behind for his efforts.

Mush continued doggedly at his assigned task, either oblivious that his side had already lost, or not caring. Or possibly stoned.

The people in LAV #1 had all been knocked briefly unconscious by the two tanks exploding, so had not reported on Mush or taken action to stop him.

Action was taken now.

As soon as Boz and Simon in the command center knew what Mush was up to, so did their Duplicates in the other LAV's. And those Duplicates began firing the vehicular weapons controlled by them.

Abe would have too, but, while the tanks had had hull-mounted machine-guns - replaced with disintegrators by Issac Fields - for the driver to operate, the LAV-25 did not.

Streams of 30 caliber machine-gun bullets and 25mm cannon rounds started hitting Mush's powersuit. The force of those impacts knocked him down and shoved him backwards, like a fire-hose directed at a garden gnome.

Mush slid backwards, and as he went his battlesuit was constantly shedding bits of the trash from which it was made. He left a trail of such trash all the way to the ruined building, into which he disappeared.

"I had wondered what happened to him?" Ron said.

"Are we expecting any other surprises - like from those toy trains?" Boz asked.

"Not from those," Beth offered. "Beth-4 watched that side-show through to the end. Most of the toy trains got destroyed by our combat robot, before it too was destroyed by thermite paintball hits from a few gang-members. Then our remaining GP robots took on the active gangers and the remaining explosive trains, and both sides pretty much took each-other out. We have one GP robot left, who is about to rejoin the vehicles."

"Thanks for the summary," Boz offered. "Things got so busy I lost track. By the way, have the GP robot grab some of those thermite paintballs - maybe a gun full - and bring them back with him. They do more than regular thermite should, and I want to run them through the Replicator, then see what they can do. Some of the layers on our tanks should be immune to thermite, yet this burned through anyway. That could be useful."

Simon asked, "About that - why did it take so long to burn through the Tiger G, and so little time to burn through the King Tiger?"

"I don't think it actually finished burning through the King Tiger." Boz answered. "I think that so much thermite covered so much area of the tank, burning so hot, that it raised the internal temperature enough for the ammunition inside to 'cook off' and explode."

Ron agreed, "Yup, it got really hot in there really fast - I know my Duplicates popped before the tank did, and there was nothing to explain that but the heat. By the way," he turned to Beth, "the one remaining GP robot - that would be Floyd the 3/4 scale one, right?" he asked hopefully.

She shook her head, "Sorry Ron, Floyd didn't make it."

Ron theatrically threw his head back and yelled "NO!" towards the sky.

They all knew to disregard it when he was silly like that.

Very soon they had the 6 LAV-25's rolling forward, with the 10-wheeler truck - looking something like a cheese-grater - floating along among them via telekinesis.

The LAV's were lop-sided and wobbly, due to a few tires being inflated while most were not.

But they still moved.

The last remaining Tiger G tank did not, due to no longer having an engine.

They elected to leave it manned and in place for a few minutes, as a sort of fortification to defend their rear.

It could aim the main gun and co-axial machine gun manually, by hand-crank, and also fire them.

And it could use the sensors, or even the laser and particle beam, as long as the back-up capacitor lasted.

That would probably be long enough.

Captain Basil spoke, "If the tank and crew were real, we'd want to leave a robot to protect it, since tanks are vulnerable in situations like that. But a Replicated tank with a crew of Duplicates is not what we should be defending just now. So we'll have both of the remaining robots accompany the LAV's all the way to the ship."

Only a few gang members showed up and took pot-shots at the LAV's as they wobbled slowly along the road for the last 6 blocks.

Before those gang members went down to storms of return fire, they managed to get some hits on the LAV's.

Each thermite paint-ball burned a golf-ball-sized hole through the LAV armor, before the flammable chemical was all used up.

A HEAT round makes a smaller hole than that, but the super-fast and super-hot jet of gas that makes the hole continues on to the other side of the hole and punches holes in other things - machinery, controls, electronics, crewmembers ammunition etc - as well, with debilitating results.

The thermite had no such effect. It burned a hole in the armor and stopped there. The only thing that penetrated the interior of the vehicle was some of the smoke given off by the burning materials.

The holes left by the thermite could have been real problems - say if there were infantry trying to fire through those holes. But the Merchant gang members were not elite assault troops. They were barely present at all. Most were at least partly stoned.

So they did not follow up, and the LAV's reached the shore successfully.

They drove right down the gravelly beach and onto the 3 ferries, which started back immediately, under remote control from the battleship.

When the ferries were about a hundred yards out into the water and moving well, the last Tiger tank - left behind with it's wrecked engine - got dismissed. They didn't need its fire support anymore, now - with no tall buildings in the way anymore - they were directly supportable by the battleship's guns if needed.

They might have left the tank a little longer if the gang members were attacking it - just to whittle down their numbers a little more - but they were avoiding it instead.

So it got dismissed and the toothaches in Abe, Simon, and Boz each eased a little, while Ron's disappeared entirely, since that was the last remaining Duplicate of him.

Ron smiled in relief and said "back in a few. I'm going to get a couple new repair robots Replicated and take them into the cafeteria for an idea I had."

Then, walking past the 3 repair robots who were almost finished repairing the Teleport Console, he left the command center.

Moments after that, Lung appeared again. He was 15 feet tall now, very scaly and dragon-like, and covered in flames while he flew with bat-like wings from the city out over the shore and towards the fleeing ferries.

He was yelling something about vengeance and paybacks and how awesome he thought he was when a 380 pound high-explosive shell fired from the 9.2 inch secondary guns on the battleship hit him in the chest and detonated, basically vaporizing him.

Little bits of pulverized Lung rained down in a wide area for what seemed like a long time.

That was still going on when the 3 repair robots announced that the Teleportation console was fixed.

As they gathered their tools and cleaned up, Boz declared "Better late than never."

"Did I just miss a joke?" Ron asked, entering the command center again, carrying a really elaborate headset that somewhat resembles the one from the movie Back to the Future when the Doctor Brown character was trying to make a mind-reading machine.

"I'd say you are carrying the joke", Simon answered. "What is that thing?"

"This, my friends," Ron said, hefting the headset, "is the key part that was missing from the thing in the cafeteria that we thought was just an entertainment center. The King Tiger had one like it, though a lot smaller, which made and controlled illusions. And that got me to wondering. So I took a couple Repair robots to it, and asked them to fix it. They turned and left, coming back a moment later with the headset. It had been laying disassembled in a workshop, and they reassembled it according to the latest blueprints they'd been given by Boz's grandpa."

He sat down and put the headset on, saying, "it works, watch."

Slimer, the gluttonous ghost from the movie Ghostbusters, appeared, along with a table piled high with dishes full of bacon, and commenced to eat it all.

It looked and sounded completely real.

Simon moaned, "oh great, now I'll never know again whether I can believe what I'm seeing - our jokester has a new tool."

"You have to work on your entrances," Boz commented dryly, "when stuff appears from nowhere, the mind tends to try to puzzle out why that is. Thus some amount of disbelief begins. Instead you should give it a believable entrance - like bursting through a wall, or coming in a door. Can you do that?"

"Don't encourage him" Simon plead.

Ron ignored him, dismissed the current illusion of Slimer and the bacon, and answered, "I can't make things go away. It doesn't make anything invisible. Instead it just adds things to what's already there. But if I add something that covers up another thing, that can effectively make it disappear, by hiding it. So yes, I could try something like this."

A vehicle with large drill forming it's front half drilled it's way up through the floor, shoving large piles of dirt to it's sides as it tunneled its way up and into the room. Once it had stopped, small hatches on top of the vehicle opened and 'bacon people' got out. They were normal-sized strips of crispy bacon, with little arms and legs made of smaller strips of bacon. Then the bacon people hauled some prisoners up out of the hatches - little 'broccoli people' all tied up in dental floss, and made them walk the plank.

Most of the room was laughing by the this time, so Ron stopped his presentation and took a bow.

Basil commented, "OK, apart from the whimsical bacon stuff, that looked totally believable. If I didn't know that, instead of dirt, there were a few levels of metal rooms below this, then the ocean below that, I could totally have believed that the thing had just dug up thru the floor. The illusionary dirt covered the metal deck nicely. So, to make sure I understand: you could not make the battleship disappear, but you could make a bigger ship - like a cruise ship - around it and hide it that way?"

"Yep, but, come on, admit it," Ron teased, "you know the bacon was the best part."

They all laughed again.