"And there's probably no jewels at all," I added, thinking of Stephanie's other career.
    "Are you coming?" she asked Ezra. The equation running through her head was that if she stayed here, he was going to volunteer to stay with her, therefore she was going to go into possibly deadly danger to avoid that situation.
    "Sure, why not. I'll get a poem out of it."
    "Onward," I sighed. It had been about an hour since I'd been disintegrated by the witch-queen of New England, and now here we were going into battle again. But, things could be worse, I reminded myself. No marelith, at least.
    We made a careful approach through the woods. Cockatrice moved silently from tree-top to tree-top. It had gotten very quiet out there, and we soon found a swath of destruction running from the ship's position across three quarters of a mile of woodland, fifteen to twenty feet wide. As we reconnoitered, it became clear that the members of Taskforce were all down. A couple were dead, the rest unconscious and none looking good.
    There was no sign of Power, and no motion from the ship.
    Then there was a creaking noise; he was behind us, some distance away. It was impossible to tell how wounded he was; surely they had done him some damage. When none of us moved, he turned and walked away, heading east at a slow amble.
    "Why don't we just let him go?" Ezra hissed.
    "Because he's going to walk right into the middle of Boston," Cockatrice murmured.
    "I assume Boston is still heavily populated even now?" Thunderbolt asked.
    "Oh yeah, it's the second largest arcology on the east coast."
    "We can't let him walk into Boston. Well more specifically, we can't," he said.
    "No, we can't," Cockatrice agreed.
    "We have a sentimental attachment to the place," I agreed. "Tactics?"
    "Brute force doesn't seem to do much," Thunderbolt noted.
    "Maybe you can drain it."
    "Try and point it in a direction other than Boston, I guess," Cockatrice said.
    "The Man created him, shouldn't the Man deal with him before he destroys the Man's assets?" Ezra wondered.
    "The Man appears to have come out rather for the worse in this little exchange, and there's plenty of normal human beings who live in those assets," I pointed out.
    "I suppose we could slam a war dirigible into him," Cockatrice suggested.
    "You mean like this one over here?"
    "It wasn't for that I wouldn't suggest it."
    "I could make a big brick out of base particles and drop it on him," Ezra said.
    "Why don't you go talk to him?" Paul suggested.
    "I could go do that, laughing boy. I could tell him where you are."
    "What's the worst that's going to happen? He's going to scream in incoherent rage and flail his fists through your afterimage?" Cockatrice said. "You're turning down the opportunity to see if there's the possibility for a peaceful resolution?"
    "That's a good point. I guess I could go talk to him, find out what he's doing."
    "Do that," I suggested.
    "What motivates him," Thunderbolt encouraged.
    "Maybe you could write a poem about it," Stephanie said.
    "Well I was going to do that anyway...." She's interested in my poetry! He flitted off toward Power. "Hey...."
    Power screamed and threw an energy blast, which passed through him.
    "Right. I don't want to get off on the wrong foot here...."
    The blue energy flashed and sputtered as it tracked his movements.
    "Friend. Friend," he extended an incorporeal hand.
    Power tried to grab his hand and rip his arm off, and failed.
    Ezra drifted backwards a bit. "All right, dude, I want to have a different kind of relationship with you. I am just like you! Force Industries made both of us like this." He discovered a moment later that yes, he could be hurt even now, as the next blast struck him square and knocked him thirty feet backwards and through a tree.
    "Negotiation doesn't seem to be working," Stephanie observed as we watched this.
    "Definitely not working," I agreed. "All right, then. I miss Phoenix Talon." I hoped he was all right, wherever, whenever.
    "Anybody figured out how to start a war dirigible yet?" Cockatrice asked.
    "Needle's a pilot. Although I probably am able to do something with it," Thunderbolt said modestly.
    "What about that poor boy?" Stephanie wanted to know.
    "He'll be fine," Thunderbolt said as the Bosonic Man floated back up, but she changed to her bigger lynx form and bounded off through the trees, changing back as she landed near Ezra.
    "Are you all right? Is everything okay?"
    "Yeah, I'm fine," he told her.
    "He looks like he's trying to find other people to attack, so just stay still. He could kill you," she whispered. "And that would suck."
    She cares!
    Power was standing still, blue energy gathering around one upraised hand.
    "He's looking," Thunderbolt muttered. We were standing still, Thunderbolt and I glowing gently under our defensive fields. Cockatrice flitted from one tree to another one a bit farther away from us. Power waved his hand, and a machine-gun like spray of energy shredded the foliage between him and us.
    "Nice," I murmured.
    "Don't move," Stephanie murmured to Ezra, changed back into a cat and dashed off through the woods.
    Ezra turned a nearby boulder into base particles and sent the stream some distance away, on the opposite side of Power, then turned it into a fairly detailed bipedal form and moved it rapidly toward Power. The rest of us wondered if Ezra could shapeshift. Power turned and fired at it, heading in the direction it had come from, away from the rest of us.
    A cat landed next to us. "The twerp's okay."
    "That was very brave of you, Stephanie," Thunderbolt whispered.
    "I was afraid of him doing something stupid. What just happened?"
    "I don't know." He had picked up an energy signature from the figure that looked like Ezra's but less coherent, before it got blown to pieces. This was not encouraging.
    "All right, we can't talk to him," Ezra whispered, reappearing near us. So he was alive, or whatever.
    "It was a good try, though," Thunderbolt told him.
    "I got him going the other direction."
    His angle had changed, but Power was still going to strike the thickly inhabited zone. At the pace he was moving, we had a couple of days to think of something.
    "Maybe the direct approach is not the best," I mused as he disappeared into the woods.
    "Step one, if anyone has any first aid training, we should probably do something about the scattered remnants. I'll go see if there's any support staff aboard the dirigible of doom," Cockatrice stated.
    "You want to go talk to the guys on the ship?" I asked Thunderbolt.
    "I'm probably best suited, I guess. Despite the fact that I'm a hundred years out of my element."
    "You've got all that training and shit."
    Those two headed toward the ship while I saw what might be done for the remaining members of Taskforce. I seemed to have learned a few things during our time in Gretchen's realm, though it is definitely harder to put things back where they're supposed to be than it is to take them apart. Two of them were dead, a man later identified as Kasikaltron and a young woman similar in build to myself. Mr. Twister was kind of hard to look at as he kept shifting state between a bipedal and amoeba form; I decided to leave him alone rather than interfere with whatever natural regenerative process was at work. The cyborg was missing both artificial arms. A set of battle-armor had been shredded and the man inside needed serious medical attention to deal with the bits that had ended up inside him; I did what I could to stop the bleeding. The man with the arm-braces had third-degree burns on both arms from the destruction of his weapons and was in shock, so I did what I could there, too. The man in the blue body-suit and the one in Native American garb were unconscious but not in immanent danger.
    The other two reached the plane; the door was closed. Systems were up and running, but it didn't look inviting. In fact one of the weapons systems was clearly tracking them.
    "You pull that trigger, I'm going to come in there," Cockatrice warned. No one fired. "Open the door and we'll try and get the wounded on board."
    No response. Ezra joined them, and walked through the wall. He was the only one there. He managed to locate the manual control for the door, and disintegrated a chair back, formed a hand out of the particles and used that to operate the door. "Come on in."
    "Excellent," Thunderbolt commented.
    "We should probably get them on board quickly, before the squirrels get here," Cockatrice said. We didn't ask questions and did that, though it took two trips and the plane was pretty crowded.
    "Um, anyone know how to fly this thing?" Stephanie asked.
    "I think between the two of us we should be able to figure it out," I told her. "Stephanie, see if you can find something to strap those guys down with." I sat down at the controls; fortunately, there's only so much they can do to the interface. I touched a couple of things and the vehicle lurched backwards. "Whoops." Got that sorted out, and we were up. "Cool."
    
    

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