Chapter 50
A not-epilogue.
More of an Omake (didn't officially happen, but could have)
Author's Note.
I wrote the following in 2018 for my brother. At the time, he was Game Master over a superheroes roleplaying game, using the Mutant's and Masterminds 2.0 (with some 1.0) rules.
In that game, I had the HMS Agamemnon as my character's HQ. I had built it to see what was possible, but intended to keep it as an offline resource (something we resort to, to rest and heal up, but otherwise do not use) so it didn't become the center of the game.
Yet it kept getting involved anyway.
Unsure if that bothered my brother, the GM, and in case it did, I wanted to offer to him, that I could remove the battleship from the game - send it off elsewhere, so it wouldn't grab the spotlight anymore and then he could run a more regular game if he wished.
The following short story was my way of making that offer - he was a big fan of Star Trek, the original series, so I had the battleship doing something like that (fans may recognize the episodes).
My brother, ever indomitable, liked the story, and responded, in-game, by having the battleship get attacked by lots of space cruisers (using the stats for those in the book, plus some augmentations). It was a blast - pardon the pun.
He died suddenly, 4 weeks after I sent him this story, which, among other things, made this story more special to me.
I thought of posting it, but it would have taken twice as much explanation as there was story.
Mulling that over, eventually led to the Space Battleship Agamemnon story you've presumably just read (since this is posted at the end of that).
Anyway, if you've read that, then you already know what the battleship can do, and how, so I need not explain further and so I present the story as-is.
Note the characters and circumstances are different, only the battleship is (mostly) the same.
I would ask that if you have criticisms, please keep them to yourself, this time. It wasn't originally written for publication and is presented here as a tribute to my brother, more than anything. He is the one who got me writing in the first place. I respect him immensely.
Consider the quote: "Any idiot can criticize, and most do."
If you can write better than this, great, my hat is off to you. I know my writing is quirky and not to everyone's taste - you don't have to tell me.
-0-0-0-
Da duh DAAA, du da da da DUH!
DUH DUH!
Star Mech
These are the voyages of the battleship Agamemnon. It's 5-year sentence, to get out, and stay away from our civilization. To explore new ways of entertaining ourselves without hassling the GM. To Boldly go amuse themselves elsewhere, where no man has gone before.
Captain's Log, Stardate 1
Having stomped the fleet sent by PTEA to invade Mars, and being sent away to prevent further game imbalance, We collected our families and flew the battleship to Saturn.
There we had a day of target practice and shuttle races, followed by treating the moons and rings as an obstacle course and having more races there.
The crew is very much from redneck-type backgrounds.
There are variation but mostly they are rough-and ready teamster types hired for their expertise with guns.
They look for such fun as that, and love taking risks, though I, Captain Hanks keep the risk-taking very well restrained.
For instance, the shuttle races were done using only Replicated shuttles and Duplicates of the sailors. The real sailors see and feel everything the Duplicate ones do, so it was still interesting for them, while eliminating the risk.
Maybe later, when we have a better idea what we're facing, we'll let the real sailors do more and use Duplicates less.
The good ship Agamemnon has a number of useful superpowers, like the ability to Replicate shuttlecraft, missiles, and Duplicate people out of nothing, dismiss them at will, or replace them if they get broken.
About the time the racing and target practice were getting old, crewman Rand pointed out that he had a favorite video game about colonizing Alpha Centauri. He said he'd always wanted to see the real Alpha Centauri & asked if we could.
I looked around at the nearby crew, saw that nobody cared much either way, shrugged and said sure.
It took us just over half a day to get there at maximum speed.
I thought about it and couldn't see any reason to go some other speed, so we went at maximum. It isn't like conserving fuel is a concern. We run on fusion power and things we can feed into the reactor are everywhere. Heck, we can even run on the sailors' urine.
I understand there have been contests to see who could provide the most fuel that way.
Yah, there's not an engineer, scientist or doctor among them.
As long as they don't hurt anything, I don't see a problem.
They know enough to keep the ship running, and they're excellent shots, every last one of them.
So we flew to Alpha Centauri and explored it too.
Planetary exploration is nice and all, but this isn't a crew that can enjoy spending hours gazing at an excellent painting. New planets and solar systems are neat to look at, but not particularly enchanting for such a crew.
So we looked around a bit, did a lot of target practice blasting much of an asteroid belt to powder, did some more shuttle races, and were saved from boredom by the arrival of our carrier pigeon.
Carrier pigeon is what we've named one of our shuttles - the one we send back to Mars base for our mail.
When the mail arrived, carrying the usual subscriptions to Field and Stream, Soldier of Fortune, Monster Truck Daily, and similar types of magazines, we found that some prankster had included one copy of Scientific American magazine as a joke.
Nobody here reads that kind of stuff normally, but I have a little interest in that ,so, mainly to stave off boredom, I checked it out anyway.
It had an article where some astronomers were crowing to the whole world about their new discovery. They'd seen a very slight wobble in the light from a particular star, made some assumptions, done some math, and "discovered" that that star had a planet made entirely out of one huge diamond.
So I suggested we go check it out.
A huge diamond would be worth seeing, not to mention breaking off bits to sell.
So we went that way.
When we got there, we checked out the planet.
I should say 'planets' since there were 4, but 3 were gas giants which looked like completely normal gas giants. Just in case, we used the teleporter to send down a bunch of drones to each one.
Sending thousands of drones is just as easy as sending one, so we sent thousands. At first we sent quad-copters with cameras, but the winds destroyed those quickly.
So next we sent something like mini-subs - little torpedo shaped things designed to withstand as much pressure as possible.
I let the crew design their own drones - really more like playing Legos by connecting various pieces.
This, as usual, resulted in contests and amusement for the crew. They're very competitive and will turn almost anything into a contest, if they can.
Anyway, a few rounds of drones later, and after some spectacular failures, and some successes, we learned as much about the gas giants as we could.
Some drones actually made it all the way down to the 'surface' - where the gaseous atmosphere was under enough pressure to act like a liquid, then a solid.
There was no massive diamond there.
So last of all we checked out the innermost planet, figuring that must be the one.
It wasn't.
Not only isn't a diamond, but it hasn't even got any carbon as far as we can tell, and we have pretty good sensors.
We gave it a few broadsides with the main gun to make sure.
They sure did blast a big deep hole in the planet. But there wasn't any diamond hiding down there.
The guys enjoyed that, so we blasted a few more such holes.
We use mostly Replicated ammo, so conserving it is no issue. We tossed thousands of rounds at that place.
It was one big silicon rock but now it has a bit of sand as well.
We saved videos of it all, of course, plus other measurements.
We talked about sending them to Earth - to the scientists who published the paper - but the crew wanted to taunt the scientists at the same time, and so, of course, coming up with the best taunts turned into yet another contest.
While they were working on that, 2 things happened.
First, our Carrier Pigeon came back with a load of favorite videos for the crew to watch, but also came with sensor logs of a brown dwarf star - basically a lightless huge ball of hot gas - which it had passed on the way.
I figure the gravity from that brown dwarf may be the cause of the wobble which made the scientists make a series of guesses ending with them imagining a diamond planet.
I think scientists need to spend more time gambling. That way they'd learn that a series of chances - even likely chances - never work out how you think they will.
Whatever.
The second thing that happened was that I went down and used the console that controls the ship's Determine Destiny superpower.
I could see that standard amusements were wearing thin & we needed something more.
The Determine Destiny power affects random chances. At a higher power level it can do some really impressive things - like make an enemy keel over dead with a heart attack for instance.
A lower level of the same power can make somebody lose something important - like the arrest warrant they have for you.
A longer delay from the time you use the power until the desired result happens reduces the power needed.
But both of the above are too tough for our little machine. We couldn't manage to get that much power. Worse yet, only I can make it work at all, for some reason, and only so often - Like I have some extra 'mojo' which it needs in order to work.
Anyway, our little console Can manage to modify destiny just enough to, say, have a taxi pull up right when you exit your hotel and need one, or enough to let you just wander a city and just happen to meet the person you were looking for, though either one would happen about 6 hours after using the console, so you have to plan ahead.
That's what I was up to now - I wanted an entertaining coincidence in a few hours, so I set the Console going now.
I set it to have us just happen to meet an alien spaceship, if there was one around to meet.
So about the time the guys got done sending back their taunts, and evidence (rock and air samples, sensor logs etc), back to Earth. and then watched a couple of their new movies the shuttle brought, I called them to action stations.
The alien ship was almost due, assuming there were any aliens around to have their minor choices altered into just happening by.
Soon enough, one came.
Our sensors picked it up a long way out. So we saw it coming, but what then? All we have that operates at really long range is sensors, guns, and communications.
We didn't start off by communicating, since we wanted to know as much as we could before jumping into anything.
So we waited, and while it got closer, we studied it. We learned its mass, infrared signature, radar cross-section and other things that you would think would be more informative than they are.
Then they got close enough to see us too, and started jibbering at us.
Imagine somebody is speaking German at you & you only speak some language completely unlike German, like Japanese.
Then imagine that this German-speaker is cold, angry, and constipated.
Now you have a good idea of what they sounded like.
They kept jabbering away right until they got close enough to shoot at us.
Apparently they'd hoped to take us by surprise, but we'd been ready for hours.
So we simply used our Deflection superpower on their shot, since we didn't know its relative power and didn't want to risk that it'd be too much for our other defenses.
Then we shot them back. It wasn't any piddly single shot either. We blazed away with everything - railguns, lasers, particle beams, missiles and twelve inch cannons - the works.
Surprisingly, a few fragments of their ship survived.
Well, they 'survived' as far as being jagged chunks of various sizes and shapes instead of being a cloud of expanding gas like the rest of it.
But that's enough for curious crew to want to go over and check it out, which they did.
Or rather, their Duplicates did, to be safe.
They found some writing, some intact-looking artifacts, and a few alien bodies.
One of those alien bodies floating among the wreckage of their ship turned out not to be dead.
He was only faking.
We found that out when one of our crewmen passed near him and got attacked.
The big greenish alien pulled a funny-looking knife and stabbed the Duplicate crewman surprisingly hard - hard enough to dissipate the Duplicate completely despite his armored spacesuit - a Replicated spacesuit of course.
The alien quickly got put down - sprouting dozens of holes from various weapons - each of the crew had brought their own favorites, whose merits they loved to debate endlessly with each-other.
After that the crew didn't give me any grief about the quarantine I proposed.
They wanted to bring back the stuff they'd found, but I required it all stay in a Replicated shuttle for a week, being analyzed by Duplicates, so that no form of booby trap was likely to get anything we really cared about.
While we were doing that, we were surprised to receive a call - in English - from a nearby alien planet.
They had seen our emissions nearby, listened as we communicated with our crewmen, and wanted us to come meet them. They sounded as friendly and rational as could be.
The crew was excited to go.
But after our first alien encounter being one which just wanted to blast us, I was hesitant.
I don't believe in, or allow, mob rule, but I also know I have to keep the crew happy when possible, and the battleship Agamemnon is extremely tough.
So I agreed to go check it out, after maximum precautions.
We used another superpower console to make a big illusion of Agamemnon - one larger than the real ship, and in which the real ship hid off-center.
And we had every console on, manned, and ready, with plans made on how to use them in various circumstances.
Then we went.
Getting there and into orbit took very little time, and those on the planet wanted us to come down and greet them without delay.
So we arranged coordinates and 'beamed down' - or in other words, we used our teleportation console to get there.
Of course, I was feeling cautious, so What we beamed down wasn't us - it was a thousand or so Replicated drones - unmanned aerial vehicles of various sizes and capabilities, but all with video cameras live-streaming back to the ship.
That will be standard procedure if we ever beam down somewhere again, since it saved our lives in this case.
As they arrived, they were hosed down by the fire from several different weapons, which destroyed many of them.
The weapons' fire broke off almost immediately and was followed by many communications from the planet offering apologies and explanations of the 'mistake', as well as asking our real selves to beam down.
By now, I wasn't the only one who was feeling cautious and cynical. But we decided, after tons of reassurances, that beaming down some Duplicates would not risk anything that wasn't already being risked.
And we wanted to find out how they spoke our language.
So we carefully targeted the meeting coordinates, so we could wipe out any other ambush attempt, and we prepared some Duplicates and sent them down, while pretending they were the real us.
They were greeted by representatives of the planetary government who talked nice and friendly while escorting them into an enormous building, so they could go meet with the actual government.
Not long after they entered the building, our Duplicates were ambushed by government security forces and arrested, though they fought back and took down 2 security goons before all our Duplicates were subdued.
The government was surprisingly unconcerned about losing a couple security troopers.
They said that those troupers were scheduled to be eliminated anyway, so it made no difference.
When asked for clarification, they double-checked that they had confiscated any and all communication devices, then explained that they were at war with the continent across the sea. It was a strange war - they'd wanted to minimize suffering, so it was all fought by computer-simulation. Any people 'killed' in the simulation were required to surrender themselves to die in disintegration chambers within 24 hours.
They said that our ship had been killed in their simulation, so we were all required to die too.
That was why they'd attacked our drones, and then our Duplicates. And that was why they'd try to spin a story that would get the rest of the crew to beam down, ignorant of the situation, and die too.
Of course we were not ignorant of the situation, since our Duplicates are mind-linked to their originals, and all sensory information passes immediately over that link.
So we kept them talking, as if trying to reason our way out of dying but really gathering what information we could.
We kept that up right until they marched our Duplicates into disintegration chambers and 'killed' them.
That act removed any possible doubt that it was all some big joke.
These people were serious - seriously crazy.
Meanwhile they had been trying various excuses to get the rest of the ship's crew to beam down.
We did send down some more Duplicates, both to keep them pacified and to learn what more we could.
In every single instance, however we interacted with the aliens of this planet, they were duplicitous and backstabbing.
That was true whether we interacted with the first government, or their opponents across the sea, or even with small towns and villages.
The charade ended when one of their ambushes hit and 'killed' a couple of our Duplicates, who then simply dissipated.
It didn't take them long to figure out that, whatever we were doing, it wasn't the real us that they were capturing and killing.
So they immediately grabbed Agamemnon in a tractor beam.
I'm ashamed to say that, in the hours that had passed, our watchfulness had waned somewhat. That's the only way they could have tagged us like that.
But being caught in a tractor beam was not the end of us by any means. We struggled to fly away, as if that were our only available remedy, but really to learn how hard their beam could pull.
It was impressive and could pull even harder than ours could.
But we didn't need our tractor beam to fight theirs. No, we already had a solution figured out.
So we strained as hard as we could to fly away, which got them to pull as hard as they could.
Then we had our Create Object console use its superpower to make a huge anvil - just under 400 feet on a side - in-between us and the beam source. By its position, our anvil intercepted their beam and got tractored instead of our ship.
Their beam grabbed the anvil and pulled it down to the surface remarkably fast. Before they could react effectively, many tons of titanium anvil smashed down on their tractor beam projector - flattening it and everything around it.
Then they got nasty.
The fired anti-orbital weapons at us from many sites at once.
We shot down all their missiles fairly easily.
Some of their beams hit our illusion. We deflected some more, stopped even more with our forcefield and with obstacles we created in the path of oncoming beams.
But they sent enough that we even had to use our ultimate defense and teleport the whole ship just out of the path of the beams.
It could have gotten ugly, but we were not idle while they were shooting at us.
We shot back with everything we had.
The battleship has quite a lot when it comes to weapons.
We have even more defense than we have weapons, but that's still a lot of potent weapons.
They had a few score weapons, but no appreciable defense.
It didn't take us long to destroy all their weapons sites.
Then we talked about it amongst ourselves.
We're not inclined to be peacekeepers, besides, there just are not enough of us.
And this planet had proven to be corrupt and evil at every level.
So we made a bunch of ElectroMagnetic Pulse bombs and blasted the planet back to the stone age.
EMP bombs are best set off in the high atmosphere, so they killed nobody and destroyed nothing but technology - electronics specifically.
But we knew they used those extensively, so we were confident that they would not be giving anybody any trouble until they had rebuilt their civilization back up from the hunter-gatherer stage it would fall to.
It was up to them whether or not they would chose to kill each-other in the meantime. We had no way to impose peace and sanity on them.
So we left to go looking for more of that first kind of aliens - the kind that, per our investigations of their wreckage, called themselves Klingons..
When we first started, our only mission was to stay away from Earth and Mars. In doing so, we needed ways to entertain ourselves.
But that had worn thin quickly.
Now we had a new mission - one self imposed by popular acclaim.
Now we would seek out bad life and bad civilizations, and boldly send them to Hades.
-0-0-0-
Captain's Log, Stardate 2
Captain Hanks here again. I wanted to say that by Stardate 2, I don't mean that this is our second day out among the stars, but the second major event, more or less.
And what an event it was.
So we were cruising along, looking for trouble, so to speak, and we saw a nice habitable planet.
Well, we headed over to it, to give it a closer look and see if anybody lived there.
It turns out that just one did, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
We got near the planet and suddenly a forcefield shaped like a human hand appears in front of our ship. It was held palm out as if to say 'stop'. Then it grabbed us.
We don't take kindly to that and loaded all our weapons.
The Detect Mind Console showed only one thinking mind on the planet - similar to a human's mind, but alien as well. Right next to it was a serious power-source, full of a kind of power very similar to what we measure in superpowered humans.
We looked on the viewscreen and saw the power source was basically a gazebo, done in an ancient Greek style, like a miniature Parthenon, with fluted columns and white marble.
Next to it was one man, dressed like an ancient Greek, in a sort of toga-like thing. He had some of that same power in him, so we figured he was probably a superhero of some type.
About that time, the guns were loaded and we fired off everything we had - all sizes of cannons, railguns, missiles, torpedoes, lasers, particle beams, positron beams - the works. We really let him have it.
At the same time, another forcefield was forming near the front of the ship. It was shaped like a man's face - the face of the man standing near the power source down on the planet.
He'd started to say something right as we started firing.
But as our guns started going off, the expression on the face changed and his forcefield hand let go, pulled back, and went palm-out again, joined by another hand in a 'wait, let's think this over' gesture.
Instead of whatever he was going to say, he said, "Woah, woah, woah. Hold on there. Ares, uh, Mars, is that you? Only you react like that so thoroughly and quickly. It's Apollo here. Calm down buddy, I didn't mean to pick a fight with you. I'm in no shape for it and you're always too rough anyway. I just saw that metal box flying by full of humans and I needed to stop them to get some sustenance - I'm starving for worship here. It's so bad I start fading away if I'm not concentrating. I was gonna pull our old 'I'm a god, worship me' schtick, like you, me, Jupiter and the rest used to in the good old days. I didn't mean to take any of your followers away - I should have known they were yours: you always were so focused on metals and what they could do for warfare. But hey, can I borrow a few humans, for a few days. I just need a little boost, you know?"
That's rephrased in my own words for clarity, since he used a very different style of speech and phrasing.
All this was on our ship's main viewscreen, but we weren't transmitting anything. So one of my guys didn't hesitate to speak his opinion that we should just tell the guy - 'we'll disintegrate your whole planet if you piss us off' - then get out of there and not come back. I and my guy both knew it would be a lie - we can't disintegrate planets.
So we were as shocked as could be when this self-identified Apollo replied, saying "Don't lie to me human, I can see your thoughts. Out of respect for Mars, I won't blast you this time, but you've been warned."
Well, I had to think fast.
I figured that him reading our thoughts must be limited, or a lie itself, or he would know we didn't serve one of his peers: the Greek or Roman - take your pick: same gods with different names - god of war.
So I figured he had something like a voice stress analyzer to more or less detect spoken lies.
So I thought up a version of the truth, and said, "Greetings Apollo. Captain Hanks here. We have indeed come from Mars."
I meant the colony on the planet of that name, not the Roman god, who apparently might not be a myth but rather some kind of alien with superpowers.
But if Apollo assumed I meant his peer when I meant a planet - that wasn't me lying. That was him making a mistaken assumption.
So far so good - he didn't threaten me, so I continued, "We've been sent forth, by Mars, 'looking for trouble' so to speak. We've been gone a while..."
I love that word, it can mean anything from minutes to decades.
"...and haven't spoken to your buddy in, gosh, I don't even know how long."
This was also true - I really do not know when was the last time someone prayed to that particular Roman god.
And if it gave him the impression that we were under orders from, and occasionally communicating with his peer, that should get us a little protection. He obviously didn't want a quarrel with that peer.
And we would probably need some protection - while I was talking, the screen had shown Apollo shooting down cannon shells with lightning bolts from his hand. Our energy beams had hit his gazebo, and had done nothing to it. It was unmarred.
I wanted to get out of there, but, judging from what Apollo had said, he was desperate - maybe even desperate enough to risk a fight with his famously belligerent peer - so I had to find some kind of safe compromise.
I said, "We've been under orders, traveling from fight to fight, more or less. But I don't imagine it would upset Mars if we were to stop and help you out for a short time. Forgive my ignorance here - Mars does not tell me everything by any means. So can you tell me more about what sort of worship you need?"
Apollo's face - both on the man, and on the forcefield representation - lit up in a big smile, "Excellent! The quick summary is 'worship me as a god' - that used to do nicely and it skips all the complicated details about what kinds of admiration or adoration, and to what degree, work best. Just send down half a dozen or so, for a few days, and that should be enough. It charges up a kind of power reservoir of mine and is parallel, in some ways, to eating or drinking. I'd ask for more, but do not want to get on Mars' bad side again."
Our own lie detector - a feature of the Detect Mind Console - said he was telling the truth. He wasn't quite human, but near enough that the console was probably accurate.
Well," I responded, "I see some potential problems - cultural differences you might call them - but also a possible solution. I think it would fit in fine with our culture to challenge you to a series of contests. We have several men who are experts in their fields, and I expect they will likely admire you quite a bit if you can beat them. These will be friendly challenges - nothing done 'to the death' or anything like that. I don't think Mars would like any lives being wasted without need when they could instead have participated in many more battles. What do you say?"
Well, it was plain he was used to issuing decrees and being obeyed. But it was also plain he was weakened, desperate, didn't expect another source of the sustenance he needed, and didn't want to piss off the god of war - or rather his peer, the superpowered alien posing as the Roman god of war - whom he thought we served.
So he accepted.
And he accepted the rules we laid down for the various contests, too.
My guys are always up for challenges and contests.
We started with something likely to be familiar to Apollo: Greco-Roman wrestling, though with some rules changes. Biting, eye-gouging and the like were against our rules, as was wrestling naked as the Greeks used to do.
We gave him some Spandex and he said it was basically the same.
It was also to be a contest of mere physical prowess - no superpowers, but I think he cheated on that - not that we were going to make an issue of it, since our situation was rather tenuous after all.
We have some strong and experienced guys, but Apollo has some muscles too, and probably a lot of experience if he is as old as he says he is, so he took on and beat all challengers.
That got him some respect. He mellowed out some too, either in response to getting that need fed, or just as part of building friendly relationships. Probably both.
We moved on to other events, favoring such things as they did in the ancient Olympic games, like running and throwing things.
Apollo did great with javelin, but not as great in grenade-throwing or baseball, which we also tried. There are different techniques to these, and he was obviously unfamiliar with some.
We explained about sportsmanship and graciously acknowledging it when you lose, and he embraced that, saying "When competing with Mar's followers in Mars' games, by Mars' favor, what better than to follow Mars's rules?"
When he didn't win, we did some coaching sessions to show him the techniques. He took that well, and that got him some respect too.
The guys did every kind of athletic competition, and played everything else, it seemed, from checkers to pictionary, to target shooting.
Apollo really liked shooting skeet.
He even asked if it was OK if he shot some with lightning bolts. We said sure, but it doesn't count for the competition.
In many ways, he really is just an overpowered Fraternity boy - he just wants fun and friendship and used to believe he had to give orders to get that.
And every night, there was the inevitable drinking contest. Some of the guys are really experienced at that.
Ivan beat Apollo when it came to vodka.
But nobody beat Apollo when it came to wine-drinking.
Some of the guys really bonded with Apollo while they were all drinking and sharing old stories.
Apollo picked up the basics pretty quick, but still lost all the automobile races.
On the other hand, none of our guys won any of the chariot races. Some of the things Apollo could do while on a chariot moving at full speed really earned him respect, especially when they guys tried those same things and found out just how hard it is.
For a week, we had all the challenges and contests we could think of, and involved everyone who was interested. And the whole time, both sides were relaxing and building a feeling of comradeship.
Apollo really is a simple soul once you get to know him.
At the end of it, Apollo said to me, "This has been helpful, but it lacks some essentials - like if you were to eat enough, yet be short of certain vitamins. What I really need is more of an unreserved adoration - a wholehearted devotion."
"To be frank," I replied, "I'm not sure we can help you there. Our culture teaches us all to worship ourselves above all. Various celebrities get some devotion, but that stops once folks get to know them and learn they're just like the rest of us. In our society we've become unable to revere anybody but ourselves to that degree."
"Would it help if I commanded it?" he asked, looking forlorn, since he already knew the answer.
"No, that would just inspire resistance - we can be contrary and stubborn like that. But," I hastened to add, I can think of one thing - only one, sadly - that may give you what you need."
"Let's try it," Apollo replied eagerly.
"You're not going to like it." I said.
Well, he pressed and so we tried it, going step by step carefully, including showing him several videos he could imitate.
We'd looked up the myths while we'd been there, and they had examples of the Greek and Roman gods changing shape - into bulls, deer, birds and other things.
Apollo had previously demonstrated changing his size to about 20 feet tall.
So we'd asked him about changing shape and he'd demonstrated he could do that too.
And that was where my idea had come from.
And no, Apollo really didn't like it. But he'd agreed to try it, to, at least, see if it worked.
I warned him that he had to appear totally genuine or it would backlash and have reversed effects.
That was something he needed to know, but it also gave us continuing influence on him - we could starve him if he started giving orders again.
I'll never forget the moment when we dropped a curtain and certain, carefully chosen, crew members saw him and rushed forwards gushing phrases like "Who's a good doggy", then went on to pet Apollo in his canine form, stroking him and constantly gushing about the good doggy.
They were devoted pet owners and had missed their pet dogs while we were away, sailing among the stars. They'd talked about it often enough I thought that it might count for the unreserved adoration Apollo said he needed.
Once they eventually turned him loose, hours later, he said it did fill his need nicely.
Now he's a member of our crew, though I still need to find a better place to put his Greek Gazebo power source - it looks weird on the main deck.
End of log.
-0-0-0-
Author's Note
That's what I have on this story.
I had not really been thinking of a sequel, but a couple of you asked about that (thank you for that) and since you asked I've had a couple of interesting ideas there.
Also, if you have interesting ideas as far as what setting may present suitable challenges for our battleship, let me know.
I need a break for a while, but after that, a sequel is possible.