Chapter 24

Contessa had set out on a mission of revenge and was about to complete it.

After that, she wasn't sure what she'd do.

She'd been on a mission in Germany, had completed it, and had tried to go back to Cauldron's base, but that had not worked.

So she'd used her power - Path to Victory - for a way to find out why. That had led to a local Thinker whose remote viewing power could show her Cauldron's base. She'd seen the base - wrecked by huge explosions, still on fire, and with vengeful Case 53 type mutant capes still attacking the rubble to get satisfaction even after escaping from their cells within the former base.

After having it confirmed that Cauldron was effectively defunct, with its leaders and core members dead, Contessa had decided on revenge.

The same German Thinker had been able to give her enough details so that Path to Victory could operate. And with that, she'd started off.

Her power had shown her the steps to take to get here.

First a ride to the airport with the German Thinker, with only one quick stop to buy a PWK 42 pistol launcher for anti-tank-grenades, with 2 shots for it - one for her trip in and one to get out, according to her Path. PWK 42's used to be rare curiosities from the last world war, until capes came along. Then they made a resurgence as a protective item, since it could stop some of even the bulletproof capes.

After buying that, she'd gotten dropped off near the airport's back fence.

Then she climbed over that back fence, whose alarm sensors and barbed wire had both failed due to a tree branch knocked off during a recent storm. Once past the fence, she walked to a nearby shed, took the clipboard that was hanging from a nail there, then walked right to the nearest hangar, where a freight plane was almost ready to take off.

She'd paused for 90 seconds, then walked right in.

The workers there happened to be looking in other directions as Contessa approached and boarded the plane, except for one worker who saw her, but assumed the clipboard meant she was some kind of auditor and so ignored her.

Soon thereafter, the plane, with her on it, was flying to Miami.

Once in Miami, she'd followed a similar list of detailed steps, provided by her power, to get off the plane and to a ocean-side dock, pausing briefly in a back-alley behind a florist's shop on the way, to pick an orange rose out of the trash and put it in a button-hole in her shirt.

She never questioned her power. It had always worked for her: so much so that she'd grown totally dependent on it. She'd gotten her super-power - also known as Triggering - when she was 6 years old, and it had always been so useful that she'd never developed any ability of her own to solve problems, think through solutions or reason anything out. She had no need to. Her power did all that for her.

So she didn't think anything at all about why her power directed her to walk up to a certain man on the dock, say "your sister in Cleveland sends her greetings", wait for him to say "I haven't spoken with Vera in ages", and then respond "January, suborbital, denomination". It was probably a secret code phrase for some organization - maybe even her own - but she didn't wonder about that, nor care in the least.

What she cared about was that the man put an armed ship under her command and they set sail at once on a course she directed.

She didn't have any steps to do in her Path to Victory for while they sailed, so she slept.

The crew woke her when the ship had reached a specified point, and she gave them instructions.

They let her off in a small motor-boat, just to the north of a small Caribbean island.

Then they sailed around to the south of the same island to attack it as her distraction. They were told they could keep anything they could loot there. This kept them enthusiastic - they were all dressed as old-time pirates, and acted the part too. She did not know why, and did not care.

Nor did she care that, as they sailed away from where they'd dropped her off, the crew rapidly began working to change their ship's appearance from 'innocent sailing yacht' to something a lot more like a classic 18th century wooden pirate ship.

She'd heard them say something about their ship's "costume" but it wasn't important to her mission, so she didn't care.

Contessa stepped off her motor-boat and walked ashore headed inland without tying up the motorboat, nor caring that it would drift out to sea and be lost.

That was not how she was getting out again. She'd get out on an ultralight plane someone had left on the East beach, and she'd do it while her pirates were distracting everyone on the South beach.

The pirates she'd sent to the South beach had some capes among them, and were fully confident they'd win and get a lot of loot and prisoners.

Contessa knew they would lose, because her power said she had to hurry to get to the ultralight before the distraction ceased.

She didn't care about the pirates - they were just resources to be expended in achieving her mission. They didn't know that, and would disagree, so she didn't tell them.

She didn't know whether they were a government asset, a Cauldron asset, an independent group or what, and it didn't matter to her.

She was pretty-much this same way with everyone: she saw them as mere tools to be used.

She had come ashore by the end of a game trail, and she entered that trail, went 20 feet, then stopped and waited 9 minutes and 10 seconds by her watch. Then she retraced her steps the 20 feet to the beach, and lined up the PWK 42's sights on an armed robot, whose patrol of the beach had moved past her trail and left the robot facing away from her. The robot was turning to face her as she fired. It was beginning to bring up its gun as the anti-tank grenade hit its chest and detonated, sending a jet of super-hot gasses from its HEAT warhead deep into the robots chest and knocking it out.

She didn't even spare a moment to make sure it was destroyed - her power did not list any more steps needed to defeat the robot, so she didn't take any.

She re-entered and followed the game trail through woods and underbrush until it branched. She took the left branch, and moments later heard another robot clanking down the other branch. She paid it no attention and just stuck to the steps in her Path to Victory.

Her next step, when she reached the trunk of a tree killed by lightning, was to pause, unfold the silvery emergency blanket she'd taken from the ship's first aid cabinet, cut a neck-hole in one seam, and put it on like a poncho.

Then she continued right on down the path, around a turn and past a sentry robot which didn't see her since it was watching with infrared at the moment and her metabolized emergency-blanket blocked just enough of that to fall below his warning threshold.

The emergency blanket wasn't very durable, and didn't last long in the narrow game-trail, with all the branches and such brushing up against it. But it had lasted long enough.

Soon she left the trail, started climbing a small hill, paused at a bush with red flowers and picked up a rock there, took 6 more steps and threw the rock at a tall tree ahead of her and slightly to the right, then hurried forwards the last 4 steps to crest the hill and be ready to fire at her target.

As she hurried, the rock she'd thrown hit the tree, fell on a sleeping badger, woke it, and started it thrashing around looking for who had bothered it.

As she crested the hill, she could see an unarmed roundish robot moving to put itself in-between the badger and her target - a mid-sized human male standing by a table in front of some kind of statue. Her target had just released the pistol he'd been setting down.

Her gun was already up and aimed in the right direction.

She pulled her trigger.

And that should have been it.

But her gun misfired - the primer failed to ignite in the chambered cartridge.

That could happen, but was pretty rare.

She'd killed hundreds of people over the years, in service to Cauldron as they pursued the Path to Victory she'd given them for defeating the alien space-whales who were both the source of super-powers and also intent on destroying all humans, and only twice had she had a misfire like this.

It had never occurred to her that the whales, providing the Path to defeat themselves, might not have provided it accurately - that they might have provided a false path that would aid the whales in destroying all humans, instead of helping the humans destroy the whales as they'd been asked.

When she got a Path, she trusted it implicitly and pursued it blindly and unquestioningly, without wondering about the source of her power and their motivations.

Anyway, to clear such a jam, all she had to do was rack the slide to chamber another round.

She wasted no time before beginning to do so.

The nearby robot began waving around it's stupidly short arms and shouting "warning, warning" .

-0-0-0-

Boz scrambled to grab another pistol from the table, to try to defend himself from the fedora-wearing woman - who matched the description of Contessa provided by Lisa - and who had just appeared and tried to shoot him.

The particle beam pistol he'd just put down was empty, and also needed to cool down, which was why he'd been outing it down.

He also started to say "Sprich mit base. Begin the plan and lock it in.", then remembered that his Duplicates Bas-Oon and Bas-Ra - both in the command center on the battleship - knew everything he knew, as soon as he knew it, and they were already directing the robots at the right consoles to act.

Back on the HMS Agamemnon, two robots each hit the button before them, initiating the pre-set settings tied to them.

One of those buttons was on the Probability Control Console, and was set to give the worst possible luck to the person Captain Basil was looking at when he asked for the plan to be started.

The other button was on the Order Console, and locked in that bad luck for the same person, thus holding their luck bad.

The Determine Destiny Console had previously been used, twice - once for Contessa to have the bad luck of a crucial, but minor and fixable, thing go wrong for her, and once for Boz to have the good luck of Contessa's bad luck occurring at the best moment for Boz.

That was why Contessa's gun had misfired.

That wouldn't stop her - only slow her a bit and buy Boz time, but it had been what they could manage in the time they'd had for the Determine Destiny Console to charge up.

And it would be enough, since Boz and the robots completed their responses just before Contessa had reloaded.

So her attempt to reload resulted in a mis-feed of the type called a stovepipe jam.

When she attempted to clear that jam, she accidentally hit the magazine-release button too, dropping her magazine of cartridges into the sand at her feet.

While she'd been doing all that, Boz had grabbed for the nearest pistol - the laser pistol he'd begun his sculpture efforts with.

In his haste he bumped the table hard, scattering the things on it. He got the pistol, picked it up, aimed it, and tried to fire, only to discover that it was empty.

While Boz looked for a fresh battery and realized he'd used most of the ones he'd brought, Contessa grabbed her magazine out of the sand and put it back into her pistol.

She was getting frustrated. She knew what she had to do - the Path she had to follow to victory - she just couldn't manage to do it, yet. But she kept working at it, as fast as she could.

There was some commotion down on the beach, but both Boz and Contessa ignored it, focusing instead on their own contest.

Boz grabbed a spare battery from the table - now disorganized after he'd bumped it - and used it to reload his laser. He aimed and tried to fire, only to learn that he'd picked up a spent battery rather than a fresh one.

This was why he was usually so careful to be organized. But, in one moment of haste, he'd bumped the table and all that organization had been lost.

Contessa had re-inserted the gun's magazine and racked the slide to chamber a round, only to discover that the magazine's mouth had filled with sand when it hit the ground. Racking the slide had moved sand all through the mechanism, jamming the gun good.

This kind of situation was why she carried a small backup pistol.

She dropped her favorite weapon - the jammed 10mm pistol - and reached for the small .25 automatic in her pocket.

As she was pulling it out, it got snagged in the fabric.

She tugged harder and the fabric started to rip.

This was a do-or-die situation: she was in a race with her target, who was trying to kill her too, so she yanked the pistol hard, tearing the fabric badly and pulling the pistol free.

But the effort to do so had shifted the pistol in her grip. She had to shift back before she could fire.

And in the moment while she worked on that, Boz, who had finally managed to reload, shot her and killed her.

-0-0-0-

On the party beach south of Boz, there was pandemonium.

There had been so many boats of various types in the water, doing so many types of things, that nobody had paid any attention when a wooden sailing vessel sailed around the headland on the West end of the island and entered the bay by the party beach.

Nobody really paid the wooden ship any attention until they hoisted the classic Jolly Roger skull and crossbones flag, uncovered a number of gun ports, and started firing.

Each of 14 gun ports along the ship's gun deck had the muzzle of an 18th century cannon extending from it, which moved just a little bit as the gunners aimed it. Each one fired when that gun team was ready.

There were also two smaller cannons on the fore-castle, and four on the quarterdeck of the ship, as well as six even smaller cannon - each not much bigger than a shotgun - attached to swivel mounts on the ships railing.

All these aimed and fired in a similar fashion - when their own gunners thought their aim was right.

The first four of the big guns on the gun deck each hit a GP robot guarding the beach, demonstrating such high accuracy that some super-power must be involved.

Each of those four robots was hit by an 18 pound solid iron ball projectile moving about twice the speed those historically moved at. The result was that the robots got knocked backward and down, emitting showers of sparks as they fell, as well as being severely dented in 3 cases. The fourth robot had its head torn completely off.

The fifth big gun missed the robot it had targeted.

The next four big guns hit and took out a GP robot each.

The two big guns after that each hit the King Tiger tank - one hit the side of the tank hull, and one hit the side of the turret. Both of these hits used HEAT - High Explosive Anti-Tank - rounds, and the resulting explosions sent jets of super-hot gasses deep into, but not all the way through, the composite armor. Still, the tank smoked and sat idle, so it looked dead.

The twelfth big gun missed the robot it was aiming at.

The thirteenth big gun hit and destroyed the final GP robot, not counting the two that had been targeted and missed, on the beach.

The fourteenth and final big gun aimed at one of the 2 remaining GP robots on the beach - the two which had been shot at and missed. The 18 pound ball it fired, hit the robot in the abdomen and sunk deep, fracturing key linkages and actually splitting the robot into upper and lower halves, which fell to the sand in slightly different places.

While the big guns had been firing, the swivel guns attached to the ship's deck railings had also been firing, all while the pirate ship had been getting closer to shore.

Four swivel guns - aimed by gunners whose pirate costumes included eye-patches - got fired at groups of people still using the gun ranges. Nobody was currently on the combat pistol course, but two were shooting skeet on the shotgun range, and 7 were using the rifle range - three standing, two prone, and two sitting at a picnic table firing from the bench-rest position.

The projectiles that came out of the swivel guns looked a little like cigars with very small fins, which caused them to rotate as they flew. That rotation made the cigars quickly unwrap themselves and expand, revealing that they had been tightly-wound nets. The nets expanded until they were almost 20 feet across before impact with their target groups.

The skeet shooters and standing rifle shooters all got thoroughly entangled in nets.

The two shooters sitting at the picnic table got entangled along with their picnic table.

The prone rifle shooters got brushed by a net as it passed by them. But the net did not snag onto any part of the shooters or their equipment, so it continued on past them and into a sand dune beyond them.

The other 2 swivel guns - also aimed by gunners wearing eye-patches - both got fired at groups of partiers on the beach.

A group of 4, and a group of three partiers all got entangled in those nets. Of the 7 entangled party-goers, 3 had started to draw concealed pistols.

Not many of the people at the party had brought guns, but some had.

After the main guns on the pirate ship's gun deck had finished firing, the secondary guns on the fore-castle and quarterdeck - all of which also had gunners wearing eye-patches - fired at any remaining threats.

The first secondary gun fired at the 11th GP robot on the beach - the last one that had not been hit, though it had been shot at once.

This time, the robot got hit. The impact wasn't as impressive as with the big 18-pounder primary guns. The secondary guns only fired 9 pound solid iron balls. But that projectile was still enough to knock the robot back 3 feet, make it fall prone, and give it a dent the size of a softball in its torso.

The second and third secondary guns both fired at the 2 GP robots working in the pistol combat course, over at the firing range.

Those robots had not previously been visible, but had begun to come out in an effort to respond to the attack.

One got hit in the head, crumpling that, and knocking the remains of the robot down and back.

The other got hit in the left arm, shearing that off and spinning the robot around its long axis.

The fourth secondary gun shot the repair robot near Boz, shattering the transparent dome it had where a head would normally be, and disabling it.

The last two secondary guns both fired at the remaining GP robot in the pistol course - the one that now had only one arm.

One iron ball hit the torso of the robot, making a softball-sized dent, knocking down the now-disabled robot, and making the last 9-pounder shot miss.

The cannons on the side of the pirate ship facing the sea - the starboard side - fired shots across the bows of any boats that were moving. That was mainly a few speedboats towing waterskiiers. Then they fired with intent on any boats, whether speedboat, houseboat, diving boat or whatever, that didn't stop and wait to be captured.

They only had to hit three boats before the rest got the message.

The pirate gun crews each started reloading their muzzle-loading cannons right after firing them.

While they had been firing, other things had been happening as well.

A few people on the beach had brought their concealed pistols to the party.

Half a dozen had pulled out those pistols and started shooting back at the pirate ship. But that ship never got closer than 100 feet to the shore, and 100+ feet is a very difficult shot for most pistols. So these folks didn't achieve much.

Nor did the shotgunners at the firing range, who had both turned and fired their skeet loads at the pirate ship. This was a pointless gesture of defiance, since there was no way the light #8 shot would ever make it all the way to the ship, much less damage anything there.

Both shotgunners then had laid hold on the best ammunition presently available - a #4 shot, suitable for small animals - and had started loading it.

But they'd been caught in a pirate net before they'd finished loading.

The guys on the rifle range had a much bigger - though still small - impact on the pirates.

The moment the pirates had opened fire, the rifle men at the gun range had turned and fired back at the gunners on the pirate ship's quarterdeck.

They'd hit several, though with unexpected and odd results.

Well-aimed shots that really should have impacted pirates 'center-mass' in their torsos, seemed to curve in mid-flight, and hit their parrots instead, if they still had one.

Every single pirate observable on the pirate ship had started the fight with a parrot on the shoulder of the white puffy shirts they were all wearing. The parrots appeared to be made of cloth, rather than real birds, but when they got hit, they shattered into bits as if they'd been sculpted from ice.

And when a pirate who had lost his parrot got shot a second time, those shots seemed to curve in mid-flight, and instead of what was aimed at, they hit one of three places: the flesh of the upper arm, or a shoulder, or the side. In all three of those cases, the bullet passed right through the flesh and out the other side, hitting nothing crucial on the way, and only leaving a small bleeding hole suitable for the main character of an action-movie. After impact and a dramatic spray of blood staining his white puffy shirt, these hits did little, if anything, to impair the wounded pirates.

But at least, when any pirate was hit a third time, those hits behaved as expected, with no unexplained shenanigans.

The rifle shooters had just learned this before the pirate nets hit them too.

The standing shooters got so tangled up in their net they could do nothing but struggle trying to get free.

The two prone rifle shooters, whose net had touched them but not snagged or tangled them up, just kept shooting.

Of the two bench-rest shooters entangled with the picnic table, Abe was one, and he was able to sort-of lay down along his bench, then roll under the table, into the open space there, then pull out a knife and start cutting the net to free them.

Almost 200 other pirates, not involved in manning the ship's guns, had been crowding the ship's deck and rigging.

About this time - the moment the pirate ship's cannon finished shooting and started to reload - these other pirates charged the beach.

They did this mainly in two unorthodox ways.

The 3 masts on their ship each had 3 square sails, hanging from something called a 'yard', which is a horizontal pole attached to the mast and there to support the sail but able to pivot with the wind.

The end of such a 'yard' is called a 'yardarm', and these pirates had attached long ropes to the yardarms on the landward side of their ship.

These 9 landward yardarms suddenly extended themselves to be fifty feet longer.

Wood does not stretch like that without super-powers being involved, but these pirates had already demonstrated they had super-powered support.

As the yardarms stretched towards the shore, pirates started swinging, Tarzan-style, on the ropes, leaving the ship and arriving on shore a moment later.

A steady stream of pirates swung to shore this way. All arrived at least gracefully, with some doing better than that and arriving with some kind of acrobatic display such as a flip or somersault.

That was the only friendly aspect of their arrival, since, immediately after arriving, they pulled out pistols and fired nets at people, or, in cases where they faced some kind of challenge, they often pulled out cutlasses and attacked.

The other unorthodox way in which many pirates got from their ship to the shore, was based on a similar mechanic.

But for these, instead of a wooden yardarm extending, it was their wooden peg-legs extending to allow them to basically pole-vault the 100 feet to shore.

These pirates started at the starboard - the side away from the shore - deck railing, ran across the deck to gaps in the port railing and leaped as far and as high as they could, out over the water, pointing their peg-legs at a mid-way point as they did so, and extending their wooden-legs.

The peg-legs instantly grew down to and through the water's surface, until they reached the sea-floor about midway between the pirate ship and the shore.

That long peg-leg them acted just like the pole in pole-vaulting, supporting the pirate through a long arc all the way to the shore, where they landed and retracted the pegs to merely leg-sized again.

Then some of them moved around the beach quickly, by using their peg-legs' extension ability as a sort of turbocharged Pogo-stick, to hop around like caterpillars.

Otherwise, they acted just like the other pirates attacking or firing nets, of which they never seemed to run out.

Indeed, most pirates carried 6 or 8 of their big old-style black-powder single-shot flintlock muzzle-loading pistols. Historical pirates had done the same, in order to get as many shots as possible from the single-shot weapons.

But these pirates somehow had more such pistols than they actually carried. Somehow - likely another super-power - they could keep drawing and firing fresh pistols, yet always have another loaded pistol they could draw when they wanted.

In almost no time, party-goers on the beach were getting captured wholesale.