Chapter 35
Abe spoke first, "Four attack vectors identified. Mannequin is walking along the sea floor towards us from the west, while Chuckles and Hatchet Face close in from north and south using Scuba gear including hanging onto those motors that are kinda like torpedoes. No sign of Crawler. Their main force is coming in a speedboat from the docks: Jack Slash, Bonesaw, Burnscar, and Shatterbird are all there and maintaining physical contact with Siberian, which, as Lisa tells us,will make them invulnerable. Let's find out."
He touched a control and the ships guns started firing.
He passed firing control for groups of guns to various Old Codgers he'd trained, so he could concentrate on observing the results.
The results were as expected: lasers, particle beams, positron beams, missiles, and all sizes of cannons hit Siberian and her group and had no effect on them or on their speedboat.
While the gunners were firing and observing, then adjusting, trying other things and firing again, everybody else was busy too.
Simon launched UAV's to film everything.
Ron got ready with the illusion headset, while seated at the Deflection Console..
Beth's group got busy with the ship's sensors.
Big Tom got busy Replicating robots to stand ready along the ships deck.
Iggy used the Telekinesis Console to lift HatchetFace out of the water and hold him, squirming and helpless, in mid-air.
And Colonel Harry did similarly with the Gravity Control Console to lift Chuckles from the water and hold him helpless in mid-air.
Boz coordinated it all.
Capturing Chuckles had been discussed in advance, and Gravity Control was the preferred choice for Chuckles, since the wide area affected by Gravity Control would tend to counteract Chuckles' speed: being able to rapidly dodge a few feet this way or that doesn't matter much when the area affected is a hundred feet across.
This worked, and was surprisingly dramatic as lots of water was lifted - or rather, it fell upwards - with him, but them rapidly drained away in all directions.
Chuckles tried to swim away with the escaping water, and would have succeeded, except that Colonel Harry was adjusting the Gravity Control to keep it centered on Chuckles..
So he was left in mid-air, unable to fly and therefore unable to move.
When Chuckles was helpless in mid-air, with UAV's ready and filming him from several angles so Lisa would have the proof needed to collect the bounty, Boz gave the go-ahead to shoot him.
Since the ship's own armaments were busy with Siberian's group, and to make a point, twenty GP robots standing along the railings on the ship's deck each fired one pistol bullet into Chuckles' mid-section.
All 20 hit.
Chuckles reacted like he was being pummeled, and indeed, he was.
Beth said, "I thought we were going to kill him?"
Boz answered, "We have. Imagine 20 strong men hitting you with baseball bats. That's about what he just got. The bullets didn't penetrate much due to his internal armor. But they did pummel him to death. We did it this way so that folks watching this could realize they could have done the same, and ended The Nine much sooner, or at least made them just The Two, or The Three."
Ron asked with some eagerness, "So if that's been demonstrated adequately, can I go ahead as we discussed?"
"Sure, go ahead." Boz smiled.
Ron signaled a repair robot to begin. It used its own telekinesis to lift a large cream-pie from the ship's deck, fly it over to Chuckles the clown, and hit him in the face with it.
A moment later, the pie-pan - still held against Chuckles' face - exploded.
That left no doubt that Chuckles was dead.
"The hardest part," Ron observed, "was getting enough cream pies together. I Replicated 2 dozen, I think, to put into that one big one. The pan was easy - just Replicate a bunch of plastic explosive and shape it right, then add a radio detonator. It seemed like the way a clown would want to go."
People weren't really listening to him - they were busy with a battle.
Mannequin had been seized and lifted into the air just as Chuckles had before him.
Mannequin wasn't as fast as Chuckles, but he was far more 'wiggly', for lack of a better term.
He kept launching limbs, tethered by chains, as improvised grappling hooks to try to grab something, anything, to help him move.
He tried grabbing flotsam, a nearby small boat, and even the battleship though that was still way outside his range.
And once he got the water clear from his jetpack nozzles, he tried that too. But by then 4 repair robots were holding him with their telekinesis, so he went nowhere despite his jetpack's thrust.
As soon as the UAV's had video cameras on Mannequin from multiple angles, Boz gave the order to shoot.
Twenty combat robots on Agamemnon's deck fired one 20mm round each. These pierced right through Mannequin's armor. They hit and destroyed each and every separable piece of Mannequin, to make sure he was dead.
Then something slammed hard into the battleship, ringing it like a huge gong and knocking down most of the people on board.
As he got back to his feet, Boz could see on screen what had done it. The aft deck was covered in gore, in the center of which was an elephant-sized, black, cross between a bear and a panther, covered in armor plates, spikes, and extra eyes.
Crawler had dropped in - literally.
As Boz watched, the sport parachute which Crawler had used to guide, though not materially slow, his descent, fluttered down onto the beast.
That made Crawler appear to wiggle.
No...he was actually wiggling - writhing in pain.
Boz guessed they'd pressed some small plane operator into service somehow and planned to get Crawler to drop onto the ship this way - well, almost this way. They'd likely planned for Crawler's regeneration to keep working.
But the battleship's neutralization field was preventing that.
As Boz realized that, he started to give orders for Crawler to be held in position by telekinesis.
That was complicated by the ship's one beam being busy holding HatchetFace in mid-air, and most of the robots on deck having been pitched overboard by Crawler's impact.
By the time Boz identified a repair robot whose telekinesis was currently unused, and told it to hold Crawler in place, Crawler had managed to wiggle himself overboard.
So Boz told his repair robot to hold HatchetFace in mid-air with it's tk - taking over from the ship's tk beam and freeing that up to fish out Crawler.
Crawler must have sunk fast, and passed the 50 foot mark, since he had obviously regenerated by the time they got him telekinetically hoisted into mid-air.
He was apparently hopping mad too, since he lashed out in every direction at once and spat acid too - not that any of the mattered. He was too far away from anything else, and he stayed that far away too.
"Sorry for that surprise," Beth offered. "I've figured it out though. Sometime during training someone must have set our detection ranges down to just under 2 miles and forgotten it there. So The Nine could assemble on shore, position themselves, and come at us before we noticed. And the small plane I can now detect flying away after bombing us with Crawler - it is over 2 miles high, so we didn't see it coming either."
"I think he actually dented the deck plating there," Boz wondered, in awe. Then he returned to normal, "Thanks Beth. Don't bother looking for who exactly left the range knob that way - we all make mistakes and I'm very certain they won't make that one again. Also, I don't want the kind of work environment where folks feel a need to hide their mistakes."
"Thanks Boz, but here is something that may be urgent," Beth interrupted. "There is something strange about how Siberian is showing up - or rather, Not showing up - on the Detection Consoles. The other four in the same boat all show up as having just about the maximum possible Affinity for Hurting Others. Those four also have very high Hostile Intent readings, minds full of anger, and they pose varying levels of danger to us. But Siberian is not showing up on any of those Detection Consoles - not at all."
"Definitely a concern, but hold a moment, please," Boz replied.
Then he quickly directed the repair robot holding Hatchet Face in its' telekinesis beam, to move that captive certain ways.
Hatchet Face got around to that side of the ship, and then into the way of the oncoming speedboat, just in time, so that it appeared to be his neutralizing field they impacted.
That had been the plan, so as to disguise the fact that the ship had its own neutralizing field. But plans had gone a little haywire when everyone was thrown to the floor by Crawler's arrival.
The plan had also included repair robots lifting everyone from that speedboat into mid-air as soon as they hit the neutralizing field.
But many robots had gone overboard when Crawler hit, and Big Tom had not made many replacements yet.
So Shatterbird and Bonesaw got lifted immediately out of the boat, and held immobile in mid-air within the neutralizing field.
Jack Slash and Burnscar stayed in the boat briefly, until it smashed itself against the side of the battleship - no one having remained at the controls to prevent that. Then they splashed around in the water briefly before also being hoisted aloft and held, helpless and immobile, within the neutralizing field.
But Siberian had disappeared. The moment she hit the neutralizing field, she'd just winked out of existence.
The crew had barely begun commenting on that when the Siberian reappeared on shore, close to where they'd originally launched their speedboat from.
She immediately grabbed another speedboat and started again for the battleship.
A moment later Beth murmured, "Now That is fascinating."
She turned towards Boz, "Captain - I have some new information. While Siberian does not show up on our 4 favorite detection consoles - nor on the chemistry, gravity, nor electricity detection consoles either I might add - there is someone nearby who does show up very brightly. In a white van near where Siberian reappeared, there is a man who scores just as highly as The Nine do on Affinity for Hurting Others, Hostile Intent, and Danger - higher, in fact, on Danger than any of The Nine. And he has a mind full of anger too. He is staring at us intently, and I wonder if there is a connection between him and the Siberian reforming where she did."
"Interesting," Boz replied,"Add him to the zarch list - that high of an AHO score and immediate hostile intent directed specifically at us, plus the rest, merits that, sooner rather than later. Check into it more if you like - but for now we have a couple higher priorities. We have a couple minutes before Siberian gets close again, and in the meantime we have some unfinished business. I don't want to be that guy who gets the enemy under his control, lets his attention slip, and Bam! They all get away somehow. OK, folks, the UAV's are in place and filming, so it's time for the finishing moves we discussed. Let's go!"
"None too soon, either," Simon observed, "Burnscar, Jack Slash, and Shatterbird all appear to be trying to do things."
"The ones who have ranged attacks," Boz observed. "I think Shatterbird would have sung earlier except they wanted to capture the battleship intact. This suggests that she feels she is running out of options."
In fact, she was. While Boz was still speaking, Shatterbird got hit by four 40mm rounds. Then - while life still lingered - she got hit with a glass bomb. Then the glass statue she'd ironically turned into got cut into small chunks by particle beams.
At almost the same time, Jack Slash got a treatment very similar to Chuckles, except that, instead of being hit with a cream-pie, he too got hit with a glass bomb while life still lingered. Then, just as with Shatterbird, the glass statue he'd turned into got cut into small chunks by particle beams.
They didn't want anybody setting up some kind of shrine to The Nine using their statues.
Burnscar got the same treatment as Jack Slash.
Bonesaw just got turned straight to glass, without being shot first.
They didn't want any of her doomsday plagues escaping. Plagues were alive too, so they turned into glass too.
That was why they were turning the others into glass as well - in case they had such plagues ready to release upon their deaths as well.
That left only Crawler and Hatchet Face, both floating helpless in mid-air, and Siberian, rapidly approaching in a speedboat.
Right on-cue, Simon announced "Ready to fire the Longitudinal, Axially-Mounted, Energy Gun."
"See, that's why you should have let me fire it," Ron groused, "I at least appreciate the humor your Grandpa had in naming it the LAME gun."
Boz ignored him and ordered, "Fire."
The whole ship shuddered as the big disintegration gun fired.
They all saw the blue beam, 4 feet in diameter, emerge from the bow of the ship, hit the large, helpless Crawler squarely, remain on him for several seconds, then wink out.
By the time the beam been shut off and had winked out, Crawler basically had too. He'd rapidly evaporated down to nothing under the blue beam.
"Well, that's apparently something you can't regenerate from or adapt to," Boz observed. "It makes sense. To adapt to it, you'd have to find something other than protons, neutrons, and electrons to be made of."
He smirked and added, "I'm sure he could have done it, if only he'd had a little more time. So sad. Next!"
"Hatchet Face or Siberian? They're all that's left," Simon asked.
Boz answered, "Keep Hatchet Face a little longer, just in case. In fact, hide him on the seaward side of the ship so Siberian can't see him. That way she can't avoid him. He still has his Scuba gear, I see, so better yet, let's hide him underwater, so we can bring him up anywhere as a surprise."
Boz pointed at the screen, "Give me 40mm smoke rounds there, there, and there. Move Hatchet Face into the nearest body of smoke, then once the smoke hides him, move him underwater, say about 20 feet down to make it really hard to find him. Ron, be ready to make an illusion of Hatchet Face in case we need that. And now for Siberian..."
He looked to verify her progress. She hadn't made it far yet - only a few hundred yards. Then he asked, "Have we tried grabbing her in telekinesis?"
"Yes. she ignores it like it's not even there." Abe answered.
"OK," Boz pointed again, "let's get more smoke rounds there and there. Then put a teleportation portal inside the second smoke cloud. Put it there after the smoke completely obscures it, and before Siberian passes through it. The first smoke round will help, since she'll pass through that without harm and so probably assume the second will be innocuous as well. Make the teleportation portal go halfway to the moon. Let's see how she likes zero gravity and vacuum."
It took them two tries to get the smoke just right. Then they were surprised by the result.
The speedboat Siberian was in went halfway to the moon, through the portal. But Siberian continued on as if there was no portal.
Suddenly she wasn't standing in a boat anymore, and started to face-plant in the water, but caught herself on a small floating bit of trash.
Then she climbed up on it as if it was a small island.
Then she leaped from it - a super-leap, taking her up more than a hundred feet high and 300 feet long, where she landed on another small floating bit of trash, and leaped from that the same way.
The bay was full of floating bits of trash.
And so Siberian came on, leaping from one bit of inexplicably-stable trash to another, on her way to the battleship.
Ron finally managed, "Now there's something you don't see every day."
"True," Boz allowed, "OK folks, let's try Gravity Control. Raise her into the air and hold her there, if you can. In the meantime, give me three more smoke rounds, and bring her speedboat back into one of them, just to confuse the issue for anyone trying to figure out what we did. It's always a good idea to give the opposition some bad information."
Abe spoke. "She ignores our gravity control too, whether increased or reversed."
"How about Confusion rounds, or Nauseate and Fatigue rounds?" Boz asked.
"We tried them already. No apparent effect on Siberian, though the rest looked a bit sick and tired." Abe replied.
"Can we shoot the trash she is, uh, 'standing' on and leaping from? Maybe burn it up with lasers so we at least learn how fast she swims?" Boz wondered.
"We can try, but there is a lot of trash out there, and our angle isn't the best for spotting it floating on, or just under, the surface."
"Welll... OK Try that, for whatever it is worth. Also, I could use a minute to think, so let's reset her, bring Hatchet Face around under the water to where she is about to land. Hopefully she'll wink out like before when she gets into his neutralizing field. Oh, and zarch the guy in the van - with a danger reading like that, he's higher priority than floating trash is. I think a particle beam should do for him nicely."
The beam lanced out. The man in the white van was cut in half, through the van's front, and Siberian winked out.
A moment later, Hatchet Face surfaced where Siberian would have landed.
"Does that sequence seem wrong to anybody else?" Boz asked. "Hatchet Face wasn't there yet, but Siberian went away like before."
"What's more," Beth offered, "she has not re-formed. I've been watching."
"That won't do. We need proof for the reward. They'll never accept 'she just disappeared'. Ron, Give us an illusionary Siberian. Have her re-form on the dock the same as before, and leap out onto the water like she was doing. Then have Go-Jira rise up from underneath, grab her, and eat her in three bites starting headfirst. If we can't get other proof, that one should do."
He gestured to Abe and said, "Time to finish Hatchet Face. Do it before Go-Jira shows up, to avoid confusion about who did what. I'd thought some 40mm rounds would be good, but time is short so just turn him to glass and cut him up like the others."
"Aye, aye sir!"
"Sprich mit Lisa," Boz said, then, "Hey Lisa - we got all 9 and video proof of that. You'll probably need to bring lawyers and come yourself if you want the best chance of collecting the rewards."
Moments later, Lisa stepped through a teleportation portal into the command center on HMS Agamemnon.
She brought two lawyers and a gift.
She made some quick introductions, "Lawyers, this is Boz, Boz, these are lawyers."
Then they all paused to watch Go-Jira eat Siberian.
It was gory.
They watched anyway.
As Go-Jira sank again beneath the waves, Lisa said, "Thanks ever so much, my dear Boz. That was an awesome gift. And here," she extended a gift-wrapped bundle, "I brought you something too. Check it over quick before my lawyers get you - they have designs on your time." She smirked.
Boz opened the package to reveal a gun. "Ooohhh," he murmured, "A Calico 9mm Liberty IIIT Tactical Pistol with both the 50 round and the 100 round helical feed magazines. Lisa, I love it!"
"You meant to say 'Lisa, I love you', but you and I both know that, so I can accept it." Lisa smirked. "You had wanted one for a long time, and I found one there in Chicago and wanted you to have it, to always remember me by."
She gave Boz a quick hug then said, "And now to business. Boz, my lawyers here will want you to sign some forms and give them all the proof you can. I understand they'll duplicate it immediately and leave you copies, but they need the originals. While they're doing that, I'll get started on the manuals I promised you. I'll look at all your consoles first, then at the original notes, then take photocopies of the notes to take with me and study at greater length."
Beth piped up, "Before everybody gets busy with other things - Boz do you still want to ignore the PRT? They're calling us on the radio again."
"Yup," Boz replied still looking over his new gun, "We've tried talking to them several times, including during our recent descent from orbit, and they never have anything useful to say. It always amounts to 'surrender control of your everythings to us, then become either our minions or lab rats, or both, and do this voluntarily or we'll force you.' I'm just not interested in hearing that again. And they seem to be completely inflexible on the issue."
Beth nodded and Lisa jumped in, "By the way, did the PRT participate in any way against The Nine? It is their job to do so, after all."
"No, they did nothing. They didn't shoot, they didn't warn, they didn't noticeably get ready to do anything. Nothing at all." Boz replied.
"No worries, my hero," Lisa replied, "You got The Nine anyway. And this should make it easier, in a couple ways, to collect the rewards. They can't claim a share for assisting. And, if needed, we can implicitly threaten to embarrass them publicly for utterly falling down on the job."
Boz nodded and everybody got busy with their various tasks.
The command center was busy enough that Boz took the lawyers up to the bridge, and they did paperwork there, seated at a small decorative table among the many and varied potted plants.
The lawyers didn't waste any time, and soon were finishing up.
As they stood to leave, Lisa arrived, having correctly figured out on her own about how long they would take.
"This room is fabulous!" she exclaimed, "I must speak with Beth about it, and about how she manages to get such a small potted lemon tree to produce lemons."
Lisa walked around the plant-filled room slowly, checking out everything while talking. "Did you know, Boz, that The Nine really respected you as an opponent? I mean, obviously they were right to do so. But I've never heard of them orchestrating an assault as carefully as this before. They spent time planning it, and they rarely bother to do that. It is clear to me that they meant for the impact with Crawler to be your first warning, followed rapidly by Mannequin, Chuckles, and Hatchet Face swarming aboard from 3 other directions. Such an assault would have overwhelmed most defenses. But not those of my dear Boz!"
She paused in her circuit of the room to pat him on the head. "By the way, thanks for all the careful video proof of the fight and its outcome. That, and all the physical evidence, should make it easy to collect the rewards, which are quite substantial. I've had the remains of The Nine - mostly bits of glass statues - loaded into a Replicated junk. The lawyers and I will head to shore in that, check out an interesting white van that Beth was telling me about, and then go to the PRT offices and start the process of collecting the rewards. I've already got what I need for writing your manuals - Ron and Simon showed me your Grandpa's original notes, and I have photocopies of those, and of all he console controls. Although I see you have a bunch of consoles up here too - all of which are redundant copies of other consoles down below in the command center - to allow control of the ship to happen from here. Good design. I'll just check these really quick, to make sure they have only the same controls as the other ones - and then we'll be ready to go. Of course, parting from you, my dear Boz, so soon after arriving will be hard, but necessity demands it." She sighed theatrically.
Boz was used to ignoring such teasing from Lisa.
The lawyers apparently had neither sense of humor, nor any real personalities to speak of.
She opened the hatch, stepped out onto the catwalk encircling that part of the battleship's superstructure, and looked around.
Then in a little-girl voice, she said "But Grandpa, what big guns you have!"
Then in a normal voice, she added, "and so many of them, too."
"The better to shoot things with, my little red riding hood, who is sadly out of costume at the moment" a grinning Boz replied. "Sometimes you need more than one of the same kind. And sometimes you need different kinds for different purposes. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. It reminds me of my favorite poem on the subject. I first saw it in Mad Magazine. It goes like this:"
As I was going to Saint Ives,
I met a man with seven knives,
three rifles, fourteen hand-grenades,
two axes, sharp as razor-blades,
a bow-and-arrow, poison darts,
and knowledge of the martial arts.
I'll let you guess who saved our lives
as we were going to Saint Ives.
-0-0-0-
After Lisa and the lawyers left, Boz took a moment to play with his new gun.
First, he scanned it into the Replicator, of course, like they had done with so many things, most recently, the DragonSuits and jetpacks.
He wanted scans of everything, in case they needed more of them, among other reasons.
And when you first got it was the best time to get a scan - before you put any wear-and-tear on it.
Then he Replicated a shooting range. He did it bit by bit - first, a large raft, then sandbags piled up as backstops, then targets, for which he mixed in a variety of swinging steel targets with steel frames, as well as simple blocks of ice.
Then he lost track of time for a while, shooting from the ship's deck at his floating target range.
When Lisa called again, he'd been in the midst of evaluating 'like versus like'.
He had a variety of similar weapons, and was trying them in sequence to determine which he liked best in various situations.
They were all Replicated to avoid wear-and-tear and also skip the need to clean them.
He had the Calico, a Schmeisser MP-40, a Sten gun, an M3 'grease gun, a Mac-10, and a Tec-9, and was shooting man-sized blocks of ice rapidly as if they were multiple attackers.
But Lisa's voice interrupted that. "Sprich mit Boz-Man. Beam me up, my Captain..."
"How did you get it to do that?" Boz interrupted. "For most of us,it wants first and last name, and middle-name if there's two with the same names. We thought we were clever by finding a way to omit your last name, but we haven't managed to get the Communications Console to take nicknames before, and we have tried."
"Oh, the cleverness of me! What bliss," Lisa mock-gushed, "My Boz-Man called me clever. Tell me more, my love."
"You know you're clever," Boz responded, "You don't let anyone forget it. Why do you need to hear it?"
"Humphh!" she groused, "Just for that, I should withhold all the neat new information I was going to share with you."
She paused theatrically for a moment, then mock-gushed again, "But Oh!, my tender heart isn't up to punishing my dearest Boz, and I find I must share! So here is the scoop..."
By now, Boz had dismissed his Replicated guns and shooting range and was headed towards the command center.
She'd asked to be 'beamed up', so he was going to make a teleportation portal for her.
Lisa continued talking, "...We checked out the white van first. It contained the remains of Doctor Manton, famous researcher into super-powers who disappeared some time ago. Now we know where he disappeared to - he joined The Nine. There's lots of evidence that The Siberian was just a projection he was making and controlling. The evidence also shows he was a completely deranged psychotic and extreme pervert, and all-around bad person. The world is a better place now, without him in it."
"I guess that explains why The Siberian was impossible to hurt - she didn't really exist, but was something more like an illusion plus telekinesis to be able to affect other things."
"Exactly", Lisa agreed.
"Will that complicate collecting the reward?" Boz asked.
"Yes and no. I thought about that long and hard - easily a whole minute", Lisa laughed. "And I determined that I'd never be able to convince the PRT of what is so obvious - that Manton was the Slaughterhouse Nine member and The Siberian only a projection of his - and that your 'evidence' of Go-Jira eating The Siberian was adequate and convincing. So we collected the reward on that basis and didn't bother to tell them about Manton."
"You got the rewards already?"
"Oh yes, my lawyers are good, and were prepared for all the shenanigans, delaying tactics and general B.S. that the PRT pulled. So we got the check and already deposited it. But that raised an issue I need to talk with you about: they were not 'playing their best game'. They were severely distracted by some imminent event that absolutely terrorizes them. I have a theory, but need to confirm."
Her last couple of words were spoken both in-person, and through the Communications Console, as she'd just stepped through the portal Boz had made for her.
She waved at the two lawyers behind her,and said, "send them to Chicago please. This wont take long, but they bill by the hour."
While Boz was doing that, Lisa went and looked at some of the ship's sensors, changing where they were pointed and looking closely, then scowling.
A very serious Lisa noted, "It's just as I feared. The PRT was afraid of an imminent attack by an Endbringer. Leviathan is on its way here."