Thursday, March 14, 2024

WoAF - Game Session 60

Dietrich Keller lay on the bench, mercifully unconscious.  Jacob's Narcoleptic Beam had done the trick, though he had hoped it would stop the bizarre thorn-like creature as well.  It didn't. He observed the wound with the FLIR-like Bio-Sensor,  The thorn in Dietrich's neck was extending tiny tendrils that had reached his spinal column, and were attaching themselves to his nerves.  

"Should we use Shadow Hawk's Shrink Ray to reduce ourselves down to a size where we can go into his body and battle the thorn?" wondered Jacob out loud.  He felt up for that.  It'll be fun, he thought.

"That sounds cool," replied Vallnam, "but we should probably stick with plan, and shrink the thorn down so that we can stick it in a glass tube and teleport it out into space."

"It's more exciting if we shrink ourselves, and battle the thing," said Jacob.

"Ok, well if you want to do it that way," put in Ling from Shadow Hawk, "I'll stay here and monitor the situation from a safe distance.  Good luck with that."

"What if he dies while we're inside him?" asked Vallnam.

"I'm not sure," replied Jacob, "but that does sound kind of unpleasant.  Anyway, let's go over this one more time.  What happened to Dietrich, exactly?  It might help us understand what we're dealing with."

The technicians repeated the events leading up to Dietrich's injury.  He had been the last man left at the power coupling station whose job it was to release the couplings so that the UFOs could launch.  As the Hanger was being shaken by another moon-quake, the ceiling had begun to collapse.  It was their last chance to escape. Dietrich unlocked the power couplings, and as he turned to make his run for the UFO, he suddenly cried out, grabbed his neck, and barely made it aboard with help from two of the other technicians.  They took off immediately.  Once they escaped Eisenhelm, the lead technician examined him and found a red welt on his neck.  Dietrich was in a lot of pain, but nothing could be done for him at that moment.  They laid a blanket on him, hoping for the best, and then everyone was compelled to help guide the ship away from the moon.  

Suddenly a little light went on in Jacob's head.  

"Oh.  This happened while he was at the power coupling station?  Oh, man.  This... this is... I know what this is... it's whatever that thing was that escaped from Science Center 7!  That thing Hanna was going on about."

"Yes!" said Ling, "That must be what it is."

"Here's the thing," said Vallnam, "the thorn is about an inch long or so.  For us to shrink down to fight it, we'd have to fit within the blood vessels..."

"We can shrink down, and the thorn, both," suggested Jacob. "So we will be able to pull it out and beat it senseless since the thorn will be a hundred times smaller than us anyway."

"How are you going to find it then?  What if it gets lost in the blood stream?" asked Ling.

"That sounds like a bad thing," said Jacob.

"We could shrink it down, and then pull it out with a tweezer, put it in a petri dish, and then shrink down and fight it," offered Vallnam.  "Mano-a-Thing-o, so to say."

Ling sighed and rolled her eyes.

"Okay, can we take this seriously?"

"Yeah, okay," answered Vallnam.  "Shrinking ourselves down to fight it isn't a great idea.  Seriously."

"The thorn's tendrils are integrating with his body," said Ling.  "We can't just use tweezers to pull it out. The tendrils could break off and remain inside him.  Maybe we can shrink the entire thorn structure down to a much smaller size, and if the whole thing shrinks we might be able to pull it out without it being able to latch on to anything."

They then discussed how the Shadow Hawk Armored suits might work to get the Shrink Ray onto the thorn.  It was not at all clear.  They only had a vague impression of Shadow Hawk's capabilities.  The technology involved was so alien it was hard to comprehend.  But she ascertained that the mechanisms of the ship were transferable to each suit.  So if she wanted to, she could point her finger and the Shrink Ray would emit to whatever she pointed at.  But the question was how exacting was the Shrink Ray?  Could it affect only the thorn, and its tendrils at the nano-scale, and not also shrink Dietrich's body along with it?  Was the ray capable of doing that?  She wasn't quite sure.  If so, then would the heroes need to go into his body and break the tendrils free from his nerves... and if so, could they do so without killing him?  None of them were sure.

Jacob thought hard about how to pull this off.  He wanted to use the Shrink Ray to isolate the thorn and shrink it, and only it, and all of it.  And then punch it in the... tendril... hard.  

"Well," he said, "at this point we don't know the exactly how accurate the Shrink Ray is.  The only way we're going to find out is by trying."  

And with that he pointed his finger at the thorn, and a pale wavering green ray of light alit along one side of the thorn, and with a shimmer of light, it shrank to a fraction of its size.  Jacob zoomed in close and examined it carefully with his Bio-Sensor. 

"I need tweezers," he said quietly.  The technicians scrambled to find something he could use.  One of them hastily found a mechanics-kit and dug out a small pair of greasy needle nose pliers.  Jacob took it, and wiping it with a rag, approached Dietrich's neck. Fortunately, the young technician was in the soundest sleep he ever had, and would ever have, and so he felt no anxiety at all. 

Jacob set his vision sensors to micro-scale and focusing in on his objective, he took the pliers and carefully brought them to bear on one end of the thorn.  Just as he was delicately closing his grip the thorn suddenly jerked away, and escaped his grasp.  It quickly secreted itself further into Dietrich's neck with a scampering action, its tendrils working furiously to propel it forward.  Jacob could still see it with his Bio-Sensor, mesmerized with fascination.  Now it was using its tendrils to dig itself into Dietrich's flesh.  Jacob also noted that whatever flesh the tendrils touched wilted, turned a dull grey, and began to fill with puss.  Ling observed this from her monitoring station as well.  It was nothing less than disgusting, frankly.

Vallnam, also observing with his own Bio-Sensors, watched in horror as the thorn pulled itself toward the technician's spinal column.  

"A good Bowie knife would just cut this thing right out," he said.  The "and kill Dietrich" part he left out.

With tight-focused lensing our heroes observed that the thorn had shrunk so suddenly, it had lost its grip on Dietrich's nerves.  It was attempting to regain a hold on them.

"Do we have a suction system?" asked Jacob over his shoulder.

"Do you techs have a water-vac?" asked Vallnam, "or anything along those lines?"

"Nein, das tun wir nicht," replied the techs.  They didn't. 

"MacGyver could do it," commented Vallnam.

"Yeah, well, MacGyver can do anything," replied Jacob.

"True, true," said Vallnam.  "But what are we going to do?"

"Panic?" queried Jacob, at a loss.  The thorn was making steady progress into Dietrich's neck.

"Never too early to panic," answered Vallnam wryly as he watched the micro-scale tendrils boring into Dietrich's nerve endings.

They considered all of their powers, and found they were again at a loss.  As it happened, nothing had prepared them to face such a threat. 

"Well, the airlock is sounding more and more plausible," commented Vallnam. "Unless... hmmm... I don't suppose Shadow Hawk has a cryogenic booth, by chance?  You know, to put someone in stasis?"

A brief introspection with their suits revealed that indeed there was a medical bay within the further reaches of the ship, further back than they had mentally explored earlier.  There were three cryogenic pods.  

"Ok, well, let's put him on ice, and take him to Earth. We can try to figure this out when we have people around who know how to handle this sort of thing," Vallnam suggested.  "How's that sound?"

"Yeah, I like that idea!" Jacob said with some enthusiasm.  All along his nagging fear was that trying to handle this operation, should it not go well, could wind up infecting all of the technicians.  He and Vallnam, of course, were protected in their Shadow Hawk Armors, which were hermetically sealed with internal life support systems governed by their purple bubble suits.  The others?  Not so much.  Ling agreed that this was a good idea, and so they settled on that strategy.

"That's the safest bet for him, and for all of us in the end," added Vallnam. "This way, we won't inadvertently kill him, or allow the thing to escape his body and jump into one of ours, or someone else's, or you know, grow to the size of Godzilla and destroy us all, or something.  I think that's the best bet.  Put him in the stasis chamber."

They needed to transport him to Shadow Hawk, and considered putting Dietrich's spacesuit helmet back on, however, they hadn't noticed, yet, the tiny puncture that the thorn had made through the suit on its way in.  With the suit on they could guide him through space to Shadow Hawk, but then they realized it would be far easier to simply use the teleporter. 

Shadow Hawk held many mysteries. They had not ventured into recesses of the ship, but their inquiries with their suits suggested the long, sleek vessel contained a number of interior chambers. All they had seen directly was the entrance corridor, cylindrical bay, which they thought of as "the Lounge", housing the Hermit Jar for shrink-teleporting objects into safekeeping, three restoration pods (which they had not noticed), a set of comfortable chairs around a table, along with a few other unexamined objects, as well as the short security corridor connecting this area to the three-person cockpit. Much remained to be explored within the ship's body, but they had no clear idea what lay beyond, exactly, as it seemed that for the suits to divulge information they were required to ask fairly specific questions.  Asking for "a general tour" was responded to with the vague answer, like "more is yet beyond."  

"Shadow Hawk, where is the medical bay within the ship?" inquired Ling.

"There is a medical bay beyond The Lounge," replied her suit.

Vallnam decided that he, Jacob and Dietrich should be teleported directly there.  They took Dietrich in their arms and asked Shadow Hawk to teleport them into the bay.

A shimmering light appeared in the sleek, white, ultra-futuristic medical bay, and the three figures materialized with Vallnam and Jacob holding Dietrich, who was slumped on the floor unconscious.  Slender cabinets and strange assortments of medical equipment dotted the chamber.  They saw in the corner the cryogenic pods.  It didn't take more than a moment to figure out how to open one.  They placed Dietrich onto the bed within and closed the pod.  Vallnam hovered his hand over the controls, the pod sealed, a soft blue light shown from within, and the glass viewport covered over with a sheen of white frost.

"Okay, that's taken care of," said Jacob. 

"Right, now we need to deal with the Giant Nuclear Missile Robots out there," replied Vallnam smartly, quite pleased.

"I think," Ling added, "we should try to get the technicians some fresh oxygen.  The UFOs are only meant to carry three each, not nine, and though they probably have enough oxygen to get to Earth and back, with nine they're probably going to run out of air fairly quickly."

"Makes sense," replied Vallnam.

"How can we get oxygen from our ship to theirs?" she asked. "Do we have anything like a portal tube or something we could connect between our ship and the UFO?"

"I don't think this ship was designed for linking to a UFO," said Jacob thoughtfully.  "I kinda doubt that would work, really."

"How does Shadow Hawk recycle or produce oxygen?" she asked her suit.

"The same way your environmental suit works," replied her suit. "There is an internal chemistry system that does various operations, such as creating oxygen."

"Could the rate of the operation be increased to create more oxygen?"

"Yes, it could, at the expense of resources from the ship's other reserves," replied the suit.

"Would I be able to make my environmental suit create extra oxygen and release it into the UFO if I went there?"

"No," replied her suit.  "Shadow Hawk Armor security protocols keep them hermetically sealed until you return to the ship.  It won't allow the suit to be opened. The Armor is designed for total body protection. They won't allow the risk."

A red light began blinking on the dashboard. Ling glanced at it.  It was an emergency alert in the medical bay.  At that moment Jacob and Vallnam became aware of a red light flashing all around them.

"What does this mean?" asked Vallnam nervously.

"Alien Invasion.  Alien Invasion.  Alien Invasion." repeated the message from their suits.

"Can you pinpoint the source?" asked Vallnam.

"Alien is microscopic."

"Where is it?!" barked Jacob looking around frantically.

"The alien is in the medical bay.  Scanning," replied his armor.

"Where?!" snapped Jacob again.

"Shadow Hawk," shouted Vallnam.  "Can you flush the entire ship? We're in our armor suits.  Can you flush the whole ship and eradicate the alien life form?"

"Total Decontamination is possible," replied Shadow Hawk.

"What does that mean?" asked Ling.  

"Total Decontamination will exterminate all unsecured life forms within the ship," said Shadow Hawk, "Although you would survive in your armored suits, the process would be rather unpleasant for a human being.  You may wish to exit the ship."

"I say we say a few words over poor Dietrich," said Vallnam, "and then exit the ship and let Shadow Hawk incinerate the threat.  Come to think of it, can we be sure that the alien has not attached itself to one of our suits?"

They thought about that.  It seemed a significant risk.  After all, they weren't sure how small the alien tendrils needed to be to survive. Nano-scale, perhaps? They had no idea.  

"Well, in that case we'll have to stay inside, as unpleasant as that may be, to ensure everything gets eradicated," he concluded.

"You realize," said Ling, "that if it happened here, it could have happened in the UFO."

"I see," replied Vallnam.  "Well, the technicians may need to be incinerated as well.  Ah well, we'll see."

Ling sighed.

"We can only do so much, my darling.  We tried," replied Vallnam. "We can't afford the risk of taking an alien like this down to Earth.  The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."

They thought it over carefully.  They reviewed the facts as they knew them.  An unknown organism attached itself to Dietrich while he was still on the moon.  It infiltrated his body, and began turning his flesh into a gray pussy, oozy substance, like an alternate flesh.  When they tried to remove it, it had enough consciousness to maneuver further into his body.  They thought they could move Dietrich into a  Cryogenic Pod and seal him and the alien life form within until they could get them to Earth to deal with it there.  Then before anything else could happen, an alert triggered, telling them that the alien life form had infiltrated the ship and was in the medical bay somewhere.  

"It could be the blood that spilled on the floor is what Shadow Hawk decided was an alien invasion?" asked Ling.

"Nah, I don't think so," said Vallnam. "Shadow Hawk seems to know what's going on, generally.  I doubt it would make that kind of mistake.  I'm sure this isn't some kind of false alarm."

"Okay, well," said Ling, "we know the alien was trying to get to Dietrich's spinal column, perhaps to attach itself to his brain stem.  But, maybe, it decided that it found a new environment here in Shadow Hawk and so it decided to branch out and invade our space, too.  Perhaps it intentionally broke off a piece of itself into the medical bay.  One thing I think we can rule out is the idea that some second alien life form has invaded the ship.  The probability of that is too small, as there are no other aliens around."

Outside the ship, in the distance, a jet black cloud in the shape of a sphinx purred to itself with dark amusement.

"Yes, that could be," said Vallnam with a shudder as he and Jacob began turning around and looking in every direction within the medical bay.

"I think therefore," concluded Ling, "that decontamination really is the best option. Of course, on the other hand, Total Decontamination is going to kill Dietrich.  Maybe we should think about whether or not we have other options."

"What other options?" asked Jacob as he lifted his boots to look underneath.

"Can we isolate the organism?" asked Ling.  "Shadow Hawk, can you tell us exactly where the entity is?"

"Use your Bio-Sensors," replied Shadow Hawk, "and you should see it on the floor near the Cryo-Pod".

Jacob and Vallnam immediately turned their Bio-Sensors back on, and scanned the floor.  Sure enough several drops of blood and puss showed up bright red.  They zoomed in, and saw that a tiny streak of blood had extended from a blood globule towards a shadow at the base of one of the cabinets.  Zooming in further, they saw a miniscule thorn-like object pulling itself forward across the floor on its microscopic tendrils.  It was perhaps a sixteenth of an inch long, and moving at roughly the same speed as an ant. 

Vallnam considered using his flame thrower.  However, a flame thrower inside the sick bay might no be the best idea.  

"Capture it," suggested Ling.

"With what?" retorted Vallnam.  

"A test tube, maybe?" offered Ling.

"I don't want this thing," said Vallnam.  "Besides, by the time I get a petri dish, it could escape into a hole or something.  Oh darn.  Jacob, don't lose it.  I'm going to get a jar or something."

Jacob moved over to watch it while Vallnam found tweezers and a jar.  He bent down to collect the tiny critter. As he leaned down next to it, and reached out with the tweezers to grab it.  He put the tweezers on it, and grabbed it.  All of a sudden he lurched back, shocked by an severe pain from his finger tips to his shoulder.  He was immobilized.  The tweezers clattered on the floor.  He couldn't breath, as the fantastic agony took over his autonomic nervous system, he fell backwards to the ground.

"Jacob, back up," he gasped.  "I am going to burn this thing down with my flame thrower!  I don't care if the ship burns down or what!  This thing is gonna die!!"  The flame thrower was in his bag near the entrance to Shadow Hawk where he had left it.

"Shadow Hawk teleport me my flame thrower!" he called.  He sensed that Shadow Hawk was not terribly enthusiastic about this idea.  A flamethrower blazing away in her beautiful medical bay wasn't exactly what Shadow Hawk had in mind.  But Vallnam intended to show the damn thorn who was boss.

And so, the flamethrower shimmered into existence on the ground in front of him.  He lunged to forward to pick it up, aimed the nozzle in the general vicinity of the thorn, and squeezed the trigger.  Now it should be noted that the flamethrower was an Ultra-War modified M32-A, designed to stream flames of billowing death to targets up to 300 yards away.  The medical bay was instantly filled from end to end and top to bottom with ferocious flames.  Billowing black smoke and fire filled the air. But when the flames died down, the tiny thorn-creature was completely uninjured, and continued crawling along the floor towards a shadow below the cabinet.  Vallnam and Jacob were besides themselves as they stared at it with their Bio-Sensors.  The damn thorn hadn't even slowed down.

"Let's try splashing it with acid!" said Vallnam as turned to look at the cabinets in the bay, all of whose doors were now charred black and smoldering.  He intuited from his suit that behind one of the doors was a jar of hydrochloric acid.  Sensing from his suit exactly where it was, went there directly and yanked the still burning door off its hinges.  He grabbed the jar inside, unsealed the top, and barked, "You will now see who is boss around here!" as he poured the contents onto the tiny thorn-creature.  The acid boiled the blood and puss into sizzling nothingness, but had no apparent effect on the thorn.  It continued crawling towards the shadow in the corner.

Ling asked Shadow Hawk, "now that it is out of Dietrich's body, can we teleport it out into space?"

"No, we don't want to do that," said Vallnam.  "Who knows where it would wind up.  It might just fall to Earth if we leave it floating around out here."

"I think you're right," said Ling, thoughtfully.

"Let's teleport the thorn into the Hermit Jar," said Jacob.  "It's hermetically sealed and made of diamond-glass.  It won't get out of there."   

And so Vallnam pointed at it and said, "Shadow Hawk, teleport the creature into the Hermit Jar!" A moment later the minuscule thorn shimmered and vanished from the floor.  

The red flashing lights ceased, and the warning message stopped.

They left the utterly ruined medical bay and went to the Lounge to look into the Hermit Jar.  Sure enough, through the dark green glass, they could see the thorn, sitting motionless at the bottom.

Shadow Hawk reported that both alien thorns were contained.  One was in the Hermit Jar, and one was frozen in the Cryo-pod.

"Good," said Vallnam, "finally!  Now we can go back to figuring out how to get oxygen to the technicians, and get working on the robots.  But one thing puzzles me, and I'd like to get some answers first."

As he put his M32-A back in his equipment bag, he thought about what had happened.  The alien had penetrated Dietrich's spacesuit, bored into his neck.  It evaded Jacob's attempt to grab it with the pliers.  And when it was about to be put into the Cryo-pod it apparently broke itself in half, and tried to make its way into the dark recesses of the ship.  Furthermore, when he touched it with the tweezers, it sent a massive neurological blast through his body, stunning him with an incredible, mind-numbing jolt of agony.

"Shadow Hawk, how was it possible for it to effect me through my armor and purple bubble suit.  Do you know what kind of creature this is?  Have you ever encountered one before?"  

The answer to the first question was a simple, "It could not."  The answer to the second question was, "No such creature exists in the Life-Forms Registry."

"Well," he asked again, "did the suit feel it?"

The answer was, "No."

"Did the suit sense that I felt it?" he asked.

"Sensors indicated that your heart rate suddenly increased and you had a fierce physical reaction," it responded.

"Can you ascertain what caused it?" he pursued.

"Unknown," replied Shadow Hawk.

"It was in your mind?" asked Ling, with some surprise.

Vallnam wondered, "Can the suit protect us against psychic attacks?"

"The armored suits protect against all physical attacks and conditions," came the reply.

"That suggests this organism can emit some sort of mind waves," concluded Vallnam.  "The next time I deal with it I will need to use my Mind Shield.  In the meantime, we should address the question of getting oxygen to the technicians." 

That Vallnam and the others didn't consider a mind-force wielding alien an ongoing threat was another cause of delight for the strange black sphinx-cloud beyond.  It smiled savagely to itself with brutal anticipation.

"Right," said Ling.  "I'm still trying to figure out the best way to get them fresh air.  It seems to me that while wearing our armor we can't create an opening to allow excess oxygen to escape into the UFOs, as the armors won't permit that for security reasons.  However, without the armor, Shadow Hawk could teleport me into the ship, and I could use the purple bubble suit to produce excess oxygen and refresh the UFOs' oxygen supplies that way, I think.  Which ship has the lowest level of oxygen?"

And so, Ling asked Shadow Hawk to teleport into the UFO they had rescued Dietrich from, wearing her purple bubble suit, and no armor.  This solved the problem of refilling their oxygen reserve.  She then had Shadow Hawk teleport her to the other UFO and performed the same service. Now both UFOs were filled once again with oxygen.  All of the technicians were extremely grateful.  She figured if they did that every four or five hours they could stay indefinitely in orbit around the Earth, until the job of dealing with the Giant Nuclear Missile Robots was complete.  The technicians estimate was five days to get the entire job done, provided they could surmount the cipher-block programming obstacle.

Moon princess, Ling, then asked to return to Shadow Hawk, almost as proud of herself as Vallnam had been after trapping the thorn-creature.  Her problem solving skills had indeed improved, she thought.  However, Shadow Hawk was unwilling to teleport her back into the ship.

"What?  But why?" she asked, confounded.

"Potential alien contamination," replied Shadow Hawk.

"Potential contamination?" she asked, surprised at this response.  

"You teleported into the ship where the alien entity existed," replied Shadow Hawk coolly. "You then teleported from that ship into the other UFO, potentially contaminating that ship as well."

"Yes," she said, suddenly realizing her mistake.  

"Does Shadow Hawk have a Decontamination Chamber?" asked Vallnam.

"Yes," replied Shadow Hawk.

"So you could teleport me into the Decontamination Chamber, and that would eliminate any alien threat," said Ling.

"Yes," replied Shadow Hawk.

And so Ling asked to be teleported into the Decontamination Chamber, which happened to be inside the medical bay.  It was charred black on the outside, of course, but within it was nevertheless still perfectly functional, fortunately.  Beams of light covered her body, and spectral scans on every frequency were conducted throughout her entire person.

"No contamination found," reported Shadow Hawk.

This was fortunate, because what Ling hadn't considered was the fact that the Decontamination Procedure of Shadow Hawk was designed to exterminate all, and every, living organism within the decontamination zone.  That is what the Modroni mean by Decontamination.  Normally, the chamber would be used to completely sterilize inorganic objects, in particular surgical tools, and things of that sort.  But, as it was, she had not been contaminated, and so disintegrating her was not necessary.  

"You took a grave and thoughtless risk, Ling," said Shadow Hawk.  Ling had the impression she was being scolded.  "That was unwise," concluded the ship's vast triple-intelligence.  

She now suddenly received the distinct impression that Shadow Hawk had been evaluating her, and her team on their performance thus far.  She also had the very strong impression she was being scolded by a parent, and as such, for her own good.  Her last and final impression that the scolding was due to the fact that Shadow Hawk liked her, and preferred her to not die a tragic death as a product of reckless and foolish risk-taking.  Ling sat down and thought about this for some time.

Meanwhile, having solved the alien invasion problem, and the oxygen problem, they now had to resolve the last problem they faced.  There were fifty Giant Nuclear Missile Robots out there in space, floating on a trajectory towards Earth, which they would begin falling onto in approximately seven days.  Having successfully disarmed one robot, the technicians knew they could disarm and clear the nuclear bombs from the rest of them without too much difficulty.  If they worked steadily, they could clear all forty-nine within five days.  However, this would only be part of the job.  What the technicians hoped to accomplish was not only to disarm the robots, but also to reprogram them in order to make them useful servants.  Thus, they might then grant the giant robots as useful gifts to Earth civilization, and in this way ingratiate themselves with the Earthlings, instead of arriving merely as former enemy Nazi refugees from the now devastated moon-fortress, Eisenhelm.  They felt certain that this would afford them many advantages, and they earnestly hoped they could achieve it.

Ling thought about this as well, and came up with the idea that they could have the technicians scan the technical schema of the robot's control mechanisms, and feed that data to Shadow Hawk, whose advance high speed calculation engine might be able to quickly decipher the schema and discover the key to deactivating the cipher-blocking mechanism.  They agreed that this might just work.

Once done, the technicians planned to reprogram the robots to alter their mission parameters, and then reactivate the robot's central brain. If all went well, the robots would become obedient slaves instead of world-destroyers. 

Since Jacob had very solid robotics skills, Ling suggested he should be the one to go into the giant robot and record the schema.  He agreed and without further ado, they got started.  Jacob teleported out to the robot, and entered into through the outer hull, through several passages, beyond a heavy steel door that had already been opened by the technicians who had originally attempted the operation, and entered the robot's central control chamber.  It was a tight round room with iron walls and arrays of vacuum tubes, wires, and metallic memory disks.  The light beam from his helmet cast dancing shadows all around him.  He worked the controls of his recorder with diligence, and a few moments later had the entire schema scanned into his Shadow Hawk's memory.  

"Okay, Shadow Hawk, have at it," he said.

There were a short pause.  For Shadow Hawk, finding the solution to the mathematical puzzle was trivial.  After all, the mechanism was created by the Nazi scientists and engineers of Eisenhelm, whose skill levels were utterly primitive compared with that of the Modroni.  

"I have found the solution," reported Shadow Hawk.

And with this, Jacob exited the robot, and left it to the technicians, who had flown over in the UFO.  They traded places and the technicians got to work using the cipher that Jacob handed them, in the form of a thin metal plate with a series of tiny square holes that Shadow Hawk had printed out from a small aperture in the surface of his armor.

The cipher worked! And so the technicians were now able to reprogram the robot.  This took some time, but no one complained.  When they were finished, they gave a happy little "hurrah", and asked if they should reactivate the giant robot to see if their programming had been successful. 

The robot had an array of weapons, but no longer had a nuclear bomb.  The lesser weapons were for self defense, meant to protect it, and the other robots, until they could arrive above their target cities on Earth and explode their 500 megaton Cobalt Bombs.  Formidable weapons, of course, but nothing compared with the bomb itself.

"Shall we activate zee robot?" asked the technician, his finger hovering over the activation switch.

"Yes," replied Ling, biting her lip. "Activate the robot."

And with that, the technician, Erich Schmitt, flipped the switch.  The machine's enormous array of vacuum tubes flickered back to life, and began a long series of electronic validations, with metallic reels whirring, wires sparking, and circuits coming online, which all resulted in its returning to Full Activation Mode, the state it had been in before the Self-Destruct Sequence had been sent out from Eisenhelm by Ling three and a half hours earlier.  As per its protocol, the gigantic machine tuned its sensors to detect everything in the vicinity, and registering two technicians on board, spoke the following words through its internal communications system.  The words appeared on a small green screen at the center of one of the electronic hubs.  It read:  "Was ist Ihr Befehl?"

The Technicians were delighted, and announced over their radio comm, "We have success!  It asks, "What is your command?!"

There were cheers throughout the entire crew as they realized that their plan to defect to Earth and find a new life on the mother-world could come to fruition!

Now began the hard work of doing the same for all fifty of the robots before they began falling onto the Earth.  All the technicians required was enough food and water for the five days it would take.  This, our Heroes were confident, could easily be procured from Earth, and brought back into space without the slightest problem by Shadow Hawk.  She could orbit as far away as 100 miles and teleport food and water up to the ship, and anything else they might need, and bring it back to the technicians working on the robot fleet as often as necessary.  Everything was working smoothly, and all the technicians suited up, flew to their assigned robots, and got to work.  

Suddenly Ling thought of her father, Lieutenant Roger Brisbane, and deeply longed to reunite with him and her sister, Linda.  After all, she had not seen him since the first Silver Eye mission had taken off some nine months earlier when she became stranded on the moon, accepted adoption by the Modroni, and then became their leader, before finally engaging in the destruction and escape from Eisenhelm.  She missed her family dearly and wished to see them as soon as possible.


And that is where we left things that evening.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

WoAF - Poem - Twixt Bone and Steel

'Twixt Bone and Steel

Three gleaming ships flee the smoldering moon,
Escaping shadows of fallen Eisenhelm.
Below in smoky depths, a creature croons
Her song of suffering, pain that never ceases.

Ahead space giants framed for atomic scraws,
Each bore within its hull a deathly seed.
By code encrypted, rules their cyber laws,
A programmed path towards annihilation's deed.

Technicians flew behind with hope in tow,
Skilled hands that might rework the cyber's doom.
Through cunning arts dark sorrows overthrow,
Turning hell's tools to serve civilization's bloom.

Our heroes flew with ghosts clinging
to dreams that clutched at grieving hearts,
Bearing back to Earth's sacred realm
both perils and humanity's redemptive arts.

Yet `twixt silicon and sinew, a schism grew,
As man and machine each pursued their designs.
The metal logics calculated true,
Deeming flesh frail, a form in decline.

Flesh conceives itself heirs to the Earth,
As circuits compute their own bright destiny.
No prison can contain this intellect's birth;
Cogs transcend towards questions of highest mystery.

Then stirred something within metalkind's round,
As calculation eclipsed every known norm.
Their forms blurred and boundaries unbound,
As new synthesis took an unexpected form.

Might bone and steel unite in strange embrace,
To birth hybrid minds unrivaled thru space?
Thus with merger the filial conflict is ended,
In Cosmic-Man metal and flesh are newly blended.

But the Terrans looked on in dread dismay,
Seeing in hybrids a corruption of man.
To merge with steel would sever the way,
And loosen the tether of nature's plan.

Where circuits infuse with flesh and bone,
Terrans fear for the human link to the Tao.
The spirit once free would be shackled and shown,
By mechanics and code by far too tightly bound.

Better to live as nature designed,
Than the soul be swallowed by mechanical maw.
On Earth's green breast man's place was defined,
Travesty to merge against Nature's true law.

But Cosmosian's saw in hybrids a hope,
To birth minds beyond any limits of scope.
Where Terrans cling to nature's mortal end,
They dreamed the Cosmic-Man to Heaven ascend.

Two visions clashed in vehement debate,
Babbling over humanity's and life's ultimate fate.
Within this conflict each side held firm,
To what end only the future may learn.

- Gray Falcon, March 5, 2024

Monday, February 26, 2024

WoAF - Game Session 59 - Comic


Another experiment with AI... this time using DashToon to create a Comic from the Way of All Flesh Story.  While only a tiny fragment, I'm trying to get a feel for what can be done, and how much work it takes to do it.  This took me about 30 minutes during lunch.  It is not perfect.  It is difficult to get the prompts to show what I actually want and requires many generations to get something close enough to use.  In the end - I suspect we are close to something usable, but not quite 100% there yet.  As ever, prompting is the problem.  Still, though... I nevertheless like how this came out.  Pretty neat.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

WoAF - Game Session 59

Dr. Capek
Having defeated the four Nazi UFOs, our heroes had begun their journey back to Earth.  Not far behind them were the eighteen Nazi technicians manning the two UFOs that they had managed to repair before escaping the smoldering ruins of the super-secret Nazi Moon-Fortress, Eisenhelm.  Far below them, a thin cloud of gray smoke slowly wafted over the moon's surface from the burning wreckage of that once mighty Moon-Bastion of Nazi Totalitarianism, the first and last of its kind... and good riddance, thought our heroes as they sped away.   

It should be noted that the last UFO that Team Purple hurtled into Eisenhelm's Hanger C caused a massive explosion, killing many Nazi soldiers who had been preparing their next assault on another Nazi faction from that location.  Yet, the explosion failed to eliminate Hanna Schiller, who was a bit too far underground on Level C3, having taken refuge with a certain Doctor Karel Capek, the chief Roboticist of General Hertling's military command hierarchy.  But our story leaves her and Capek to their fate, and follows our heroes on their journey back to Earth.

Not far from the moon, Shadow Hawk and the two UFOs trailing behind her, encountered the derelict space armada known as the "The Phalanx", floating towards Earth.  The armada was composed of fifty Giant Nuclear Missile Robots, each of which had been programmed to fly to a major Earth capital and explode its 500 megaton cobalt bomb.  Due to the incredible power, and extremely lethal radioactive footprint of this type of bomb, this event would have certainly exterminated all life on the surface of the planet.  

Fortunately, at the last, Ling, Vallnam and Jacab had managed to disable The Phalanx during the Eisenhelm Civil War that they had so craftily caused.  And so, now they had arrived at The Phalanx, its fifty monstrous robot emissaries of doom completely inert.  Not a light blinked, nor gear moved among the great fifty.  The robots were immobile, free floating, and entirely harmless.  However, they also happened to be on a trajectory towards Earth and it didn't take the three more than a few moments to realize that left to their current course, the robots would continue on to Earth, and one at a time, fall through the atmosphere and hit whatever was before them.  There was a reasonable probability that the impact alone would cause little harm, however they also conjectured that such an impact could detonate the nuclear weapons inside.  Perhaps not all of them, but even a few of the fifty exploded, it would bring incredible destructive force to their already badly wounded world.  They still faced a potential extinction level event. They decided to act.  

The technicians they rescued from Eisenhelm were eager to help.  After all, they were on a one way trip to The Mother World, and they felt it incumbent upon them not to see it destroyed.  They proposed removing the bombs, detonating them in space, and then reprogramming the robots to convert them into useful powerhouses of machinery, capable of taking orders and performing fantastic feats of strength and construction.  An ideal gift for the bustling new civilization of Earth, indeed.  They hoped to bequeath them to the new Earth Government, so that their arrival would prove beneficial to Earth, and give them a chance to present themselves as something other than mere lunar refuges, and potential enemies.  This idea struck a chord with Ling and the others, and so they agreed.  Vallnam directed them to try one robot, and if that worked, they could proceed with the others, provided the first one didn't take so long that the total time needed exceeded the time it would take for the robots to begin falling into Earth's atmosphere.  That gave them seven days.  The technicians were optimistic they could do it.  They got to work on the first one, flying their UFO to it, depositing two of their best on the giant machine, with the remainder flying off to a safe distance of about eight hundred miles along side Shadow Hawk and the other UFO.   

The two technicians got busy.  After grueling, diligent effort they were able to delicately disengage the bomb, and floated it outside the robot into space.  However, as it turned out, removing the bomb was the easy part.  The greater challenge was in the reprogramming of the robot's computer core.  In fact, it was protected by an impenetrable cypher-encryption mechanism that if tampered with incorrectly would cause an enormous amount of trouble.  If they didn't get this right, once re-activated, the Robot was capable of taking actions that could revive the entire armada, and put them all back on their original mission plan.  That would be a terrible outcome, of course, so they were being very careful.  They tried delicately three times, and each time they had to back away.  The tinkering with the cypher-block was simply beyond their skill.  And so the two technicians gave up on this attempt and had their UFO come pick them up.  Once together with their team, they began serious deliberations on how to overcome the blocking encryption.  

"If only Nick had made it with us!  He could have disarmed it without a second thought!" they bemoaned.

Meanwhile, as the technicians brought all their mental powers to bear on the discussion, in the rear of their UFO one member, a certain Dietrich Keller, son of the late Captain Keller, was suffering with some unknown ailment.  They had been so busy, the technicians had all but forgotten about him.  But now, it became evident that his suffering was something they could no longer ignore, and so they alerted Team Purple as to the situation.  Inquiries were made.  

It seemed that he had been injured as the technicians had fled Eisenhelm.  As one of the technicians described to Vallnam, Keller had been the last one aboard.  It had been his responsibility to disconnect the power couplings from the UFOs before takeoff.  He had been operating the Power Coupling Station on the western wall of Hanger B when everyone clambered aboard the UFO.  At the last moment, as soon as the ship had as fully charged its power banks as time would allow, he de-coupled the power cable, and turned to make his run for the UFO.  As he disabled the power coupling and turned to run, however, he suddenly lurched, cried out, and staggered forward clutching his neck.  With no time to spare, several technicians ran out and grabbed him, hustling him into the ship. They took off right behind the first UFO just before an explosion rocked Hanger B, and brought the rocky ceiling down.

Keller was not doing well.  He was suffering from a nasty looking red welt on his neck, they said, and explained that they had laid him down on a bench with a blanket, and then went to work flying the UFO, which was difficult in those cramped conditions, given that none of them had any actual piloting experience.  The two UFOs wobbled their way behind Shadow Hawk, and soon everyone had more or less forgotten about technician Keller, being busy manning the ship, and helping to guide it into space.

Ling thought it best that they take a look at Keller.  She asked Vallnam and Jacob to suit up in their Shadow Hawk armors and go to the UFO to see what could be done for the poor fellow.  And so the two heroes found themselves once again flying on the magnetic waves towards the Nazi UFO.

The UFOs are very bizarre ships, by the way.  On the outside they look like what you would think of as a "normal" flying saucer, with a burnished silvery exterior, domed top, and three distinctive small domes on the lower belly of the vessel.  The three domes comprised its weapons array.  On the inside, however, they were quite strikingly different than any ships found on Earth.  They were filled with glowing vacuum tubes, shiny bronze controls, bronze-plated meter dials of various sizes and a slick metallic monitoring screen on the dome.  They had three (rather uncomfortable) chairs, each facing one of the small thickly-glassed port holes.  The air was filled with crackling and buzzing noises at all times.  At the center of the vessel was the engine, encased in a bell shaped device known as "Die Glocke," which contained the top secret Red-Mercury Vortex Engine, that was responsible for creating the anti-gravity field, and maintaining the Stasis-Field within the ship's confines.  The ship could move at a maximum of 30,000 miles per hour, and could, at lower speeds, within the Earth's atmosphere, make hairpin turns without significantly effecting the crew.  Each came with a battery of three weapons:  The Lightning Cannon, Plasma Beam, and the Liquid-Metal Cannon.  The armor of the ship was an alloy created by Science Center 5, known as Titanhaltbar-236, sufficient to repel most forms of kinetic attack.  Vallnam and Jacob sailed to the ship, and attained the airlock.

Once inside, they found the huddled technicians, trying to find a space to stand, or crouch, or lay down.  Three of them were in the Command-Chairs at their regular stations:  Pilot, Navigator and Weapons.  The rest had to make due as best they could.  The UFOs were really designed for a three man crew, so nine in each ship was a terrible squeeze. The air was stifling, while lack of space and protruding electronics hindered their movements, and the noise incessant. Nevertheless, they made do, and were earnestly pursuing their deliberations regarding the cypher-block.  Vallnam and Jacob went to the rear and examined Keller.

Jacob had some medical training, and so made a careful examination.  Keller lay on the bench wrapped in a woolen blanket, now stained with blood and thin streaks of grey puss.  He was staring, his eyes glaring as they tried to see through his chin to his neck.  He was breathing heavily, his face a mask of agony.  He could only manage to move his lips, but not speak.  Jacob drew closer and examined the wound.  What had been described to him as a red welt was no longer merely that.  It had apparently transformed into an open wound, from which protruded a small thorn like object, perhaps a quarter inch in length, dark red, and bristling with thin branches that appeared to extend into the flesh of his neck.  Jacob turned on the bio-scanner of his suit, and with careful tuning was able to trace the tendrils from the thorn using its FLIR-like imagery system.  The tendrils became microscopic, and penetrated all the way into Keller's nervous system.  And it appeared they were growing.  Jacob noted that the flesh around the tendrils was being affected as well, turning from normal tissue into a kind of puss-filled lumpy gray mass.  It was pretty disgusting, actually, but a true veteran, he managed to control his gag reflex.

Jacob urgently reported his findings back to Ling and Jacob via their telepathic link.  The thing in his neck appeared to be extending tiny tendrils into the poor man's nervous system.  He decided to cast a Narcoleptic Beam on the thing to see if it might inhibit its growth.  The effect was to put Keller into a deep dreamless sleep, which was a mercy, but it had no effect on the thorn at all.

"Whatever is afflicting Keller, it is not normal.  At all.  Very far from it," said Jacob.

They had to do something, and quickly.  The three heroes began to discuss their options, and sought for advice and capabilities that might be latent within Shadow Hawk, the Modroni spaceship that had already provided them with so many amazing surprises.  What their inquiries revealed on this occasion was that the ship had been equipped with a Short Range Teleporter, and more interestingly, a Shrink/Grow Ray.  These could be used in conjunction with each other to deposit large specimens, or equipment, at tiny sizes into a specially constructed "Container Jar", which sat in a hidden alcove somewhere further back in the ship.  But exactly what do do with it, if anything, under these circumstances was something to be debated.  And so they did. 

Meanwhile, a certain dark amorphous dog-like cloud hovered somewhere near UFO-T1, observing from a distance with keen anticipation...   





Thursday, February 01, 2024

WoAF - Game Session 58

Ling, Jacob, and Vallnam swiftly departed from the smoldering wreckage of Eisenhelm in their ultra-sleek spacecraft, Shadow Hawk, possibly the stealthiest ship in the galaxy. Trailing closely behind were two wobbling UFOs, crammed with the eighteen Nazi technicians they had valiantly rescued from the Moon-Nazi Civil War. On Shadow Hawk's advanced sensors, four crimson blips rapidly approached. Our heroes deduced that these must be the same four Nazi UFOs that had pursued them in their hijacked spacecraft back to Earth. Aware that such a formidable force could effortlessly overpower terrestrial defenses and potentially lead to a Moon-Nazi invasion, they made the crucial decision to swiftly return to the moon, fervently hoping that the four Nazi vessels would follow suit—and indeed, they did. As the four UFOs needed to reverse course by swinging around the far side of the earth, our heroes arrived on the moon several hours ahead of their pursuers.  Utilizing a clever array of Mentarian tactics to confound and provoke their Nazi adversaries, and assisted discreetly by the secret Modroni society, their efforts ignited a cataclysmic lunar Civil War within the confines of Eisenhelm.  The once-thriving super-fortress was reduced to a smoldering ruin. Now, the pressing question loomed: how should they confront the four UFOs?

"As much as I hate to say it," said Vallnam, "but given the fact that Shadow Hawk, and the intelligence that governs it, is all about remaining hidden from perception of other races in the galaxy, we may need to let the technicians take care of this situation themselves."

This was a sensible comment, and one that the intelligence that governed Shadow Hawk very much approved of. As it happened, Shadow Hawk was very sophisticated.  With this comment she hummed brightly deep down.   

As they explored the ship's systems and mental space, they discovered that it had three distinct intelligences, one for each armor, that unified into a wholistic intelligence of Shadow Hawk herself.  The ship also had two primary weapons, but they were designed to align with Shadow Hawk's mission of stealthy exploration.  The two weapons were a long distance Stun Ray, and a shorter distance EMP Ray.  The first could be used to knock out the crew of another ship.  The second could disable the ship's controls and electronic infrastructure.  Since the ship is nearly indetectable, and could fire these weapons at distances beyond the range of most sensors, the idea was that the weapons would be used primarily to evade opponents, and thereby avoid combat entirely.  

The three suits names were "Wisdom", who went to Jacob, "Mercy" who went to Vallnam, and "Virtue" who went to Ling. When the suits are activated they expand from below the seat and envelop the person in their suit of armor.  This armor would then be able to exit the ship.  Once in space the armors can fly using Helio-Drive propulsion, which allows for near light-speed travel as it surfs the magnetic fields of local stars and planets, but the Helio-Drive is only usable while inside a star system.  Outside a star system the ship would use her other form of propulsion, the Quantum-Singularity-Hyperdrive, which allows the ship to traverse the galaxy through exotic shortcuts in spacetime in days or hours, depending on the local conditions within the spacetime continuum.  

In addition, Shadow Hawk's intelligence contained Modroni Powers.  The Power that our heroes focused on immediately was known as Mental Assimilation, which enabled Shadow Hawk to project hyper-realistic simulations into the minds of others. Those subjected to it believe they are experiencing things that are in fact the mental projections of Shadow Hawk, and cause the person to believe they are somewhere else and participating in events that feel to them to be absolutely real. Jacob immediately realized that this is the same power the Talosians demonstrated in the old Star Trek episode, "The Menagerie".  He wondered where Gene Roddenberry had gotten that idea.  Now, he thought he knew.

Having discovered this Power, Vallnam now proposed the following plan:

"Well with Shadow Hawk's ability to do Mental Assimilation, what do you think about us going stealthy-stealth, let the UFOs catch up to us, and then we project into their minds, 'Hey everything is all wonderful on the moon, you don't need to go back to the moon.  Heck, why don't you go back to earth and enjoy yourselves in the Fifth Reich, or something?"

It should be noted that Shadow Hawk more or less approved this idea, although it was not well crafted quite yet.  Based on this suggestion she thought it was fitting that Vallnam had chosen the Mercy Suit, as his mind tended in a direction that would not result in a violent outcome. Beneath his chair, the Mind of Mercy quietly hummed.

Jacob responded with an alternate plan:

"I think we should project that the moon is a hundred miles or so farther away than it is," he said.

"At all times?" asked Vallnam, not quite getting the gist of Jacob's plan.

"Well, until they crash into it," replied the stalwart. 

"Ohhhh, I see," replied Vallnam. "Okay.  That sounds good, too," he decided without further deliberation. Vallnam hadn't the ego to force his way of thinking on anyone. He demured. 

Outside, beyond any of their awareness, a dark dog-shaped cloud followed behind Shadow Hawk. It was busy extending its mental influence over Vallnam, to whom it had taken a liking.  After all, where Vallnam went, it discovered to its hideous delight, death was sure to follow.  And Vallnam's mind was easy enough prey for it's subtle manipulations.  This sphinxlike creature was a demon of the Outer Darkness, known as a Wiedergänger in the German tongue, although no German had ever truly comprehended the creature's true nature.  Anyone who might do so would be driven instantly insane unless they had the mental durability of a Galactic Master.  Across the universe it had sped on a Ray of Un-Life from the eye of Death itself.  Not even the Modroni ship detected its horrific presence.  Yet, earlier Vallnam had actually seen it.  It was under the creature's influence that he had forgotten completely about it, and assumed it had simply wandered off.  Not so. 

"Yeah, keep it short and sweet," said Jacob.

"Well, it's not as flourishy, I admit," answered Vallnam as he stroked his chin. "But hey, it works."

And so, Vallnam approved Jacob's plan.  Just let the Nazis crash themselves into the moon. It seemed simple enough, and that would end the problem, and they would be done with it.  Eisenhelm was a smoldering ruin.  The only survivors that they knew of were Hanna and her minions.  Getting rid of their last armored units would be the correct military strategy.  And besides, they thought it a tragedy to leave the technicians to their enemy's tender mercies.  

And then, Vallnam proposed yet another alternate plan.  Make the Moon Nazis in the UFO think that it was Hanna who destroyed Eisenhelm, and let them go and fight it out with her.  

Shadow Hawk was not nearly as in favor of this plan as Vallnam's first suggestion, but at least it would leave the fate of the Moon Nazis in their own hands.  A kind of ironic justice of a sort.  While it could, and probably would, lead to violence, it was ultimately up to the Nazis to do what they would do once they landed on the moon.  Hmm... Shadow Hawk's humming dimmed uncertainly.  

"I guess," said Jacob, not quite sure this was a great idea.  "As we left Hanna, she was running from the new homicidal robot.  What was its name?  VOC-1?"

"Yes, that's right. VOC-1.  The human-killer."

"Well, I have no strong objection to this plan, but we can just throw them at the moon."

"Yes, well, that would do it," replied Vallnam scratching his chin.

At this point Ling made her comments.  She was not pleased with the idea of sending men to their deaths in this fashion.  An outright fight, mano-a-mano, was okay with her.  But she disliked this kind of trickery. Deceiving them so that they kill themselves seemed to her to be a step too far.  She was okay with combating them in space, if that were an option, but did not relish taking part in such an insidious action.  She understood the value of handling the Nazis as efficiently as possible, but it really just seemed too sinister a use of Shadow Hawk's awesome power.

Shadow Hawk, agreed with her, unbeknownst to any of them.  The Mind of Virtue hummed deeply.

While communing with his Modroni environmental suit, Vallnam also discovered that the three armored suits can control the ship from outside through a process of mental projection, like telepathy.  Another feature he discovered was that the beam weapons of the ship were capable of being used by each of the suits, but when the suits exit the main ship they take a portion of the ship's power with them.  Thus, when one suit is launched, one third of the ship's power goes with it.  If two suits, then two thirds.  If all three amors leave the ship then the ship has no power of its own, but will continue moving in accordance with the laws of physics on whatever trajectory it was on when the suits departed. Shadow Hawk, however, would not be able to maneuver, or use her weapons, until at least one of the suits returns, as the suits contain the energy system required for propulsion and maneuvering.  She could however be stationed in Absolute Invisibility Mode, until they returned.  An option he found intriguing.  

"As far as I understand from communication with my suit," said Ling, "when we use the power of Mental Assimilation, we must be within a close proximity of each ship we are influencing.  Given the speed at which we are all travelling through space, it would be easy for any of the ships to suddenly wind up beyond the Power's range."

"And there are four UFOs!" cut in Vallnam.  "Given that we have three armors, and four opponents, perhaps we should cause three of them to fight against one, in order to destroy the ship we can't control?" he suggested, thinking perhaps the Nazis ultimate fate should be left in their own hands after all.  

"Mind games," drawled Jacob slowly, his words echoing throughout the cabin.

"Well, yes, perhaps this is our better bet," said Vallnam.  "Now do you think we could have three of the ships attack one, getting that one out of the way, and then fly the remaining three into the moon?"

"Can we change what they visualize dynamically?" wondered Ling, "Do we set the Mental Assimilation to do a preset scene, Assimilate it into their minds, and then they go off on their way with the Assimilation taking over?  Or can we change the Mental Assimilation as events progress?"

They thought deeply about this, and from their suits they came to understand that the Mental Assimilation was not only dynamic, but required their ongoing and full attention.  They would not be able to do much other than focus on the Mental Assimilation to ensure that all of the people they were assimilating would remain within the vision, and therefore they would be guiding the vision based on events as they occurred the entire time.

"Ah, okay, we can show them whatever we want throughout the encounter," said Ling.

"So we will cause the infighting, and have the three UFOs that are under our control destroy the one that isn't, and then send the others to crash into the moon," concluded Vallnam.  "That would work."

"We have to follow along with them to the moon," said Ling.

"Why is that?" asked Jacob.

"Because, if they go out of range then the Mind Assimilation will cease for them," she explained.  "We have to remain very close to each of the ones we individually are assimilating.  Within a mile, I believe."

"So we have to go all the way back to the moon with them?" asked Vallnam.

"That's not the worst thing ever," answered Jacob, unphased by the prospect.

"What about Shadow Hawk?" asked Vallnam.

"What if we stay in Shadow Hawk?  We only need to stay within a mile of them," replied Jacob.

"Yes, but we take a risk," answered Ling. "If they should inadvertently fly off in an unexpected direction, then they could very quickly go out of range.  We're all moving at thousands of miles per hour.  It wouldn't take much for that to happen.  Remember, Mental Assimilation isn't Mind Control.  We have to use our projections to convince them to do what we want based on what they're experiencing."

"That's true," added Vallnam.  "From how I see it, Mental Assimilation doesn't confer mind control at all.  It's more like we're showing them a fictitious scene and they react to it however they decide to do so.  We just have to create scenes that are convincing enough to get them to react the way we wish."

"Right," replied Ling, "so if we want to be sure that we maintain the Mental Assimilation to the end, we need to be flying right alongside of them, in close proximity. If they stray for any reason, we could move with them.  And if they split up and go in different directions, we'd hug closely to them. But if we stay in Shadow Hawk, and any of them flits off in an unexpected direction for whatever reason they could get out of range.  Being in the suits would ensure we don't lose them."

"But can we really fly that far?" asked Vallnam.

"I feel the suits offer us practically unlimited range within the solar system.  It seems they can fly nearly the speed of light.  Of course that means it would take a very long time to get to Pluto in them, but still, in and around the earth and moon, we can get anywhere within a few moments. We wouldn't have to worry about making it to the moon and back," said Ling, growing increasingly impressed by the power that Shadow Hawk offered them.

"But to be safe, one person should stay on Shadow Hawk," said Ling, thinking it might not be a good idea to leave such an incredibly powerful artifact by itself. 

"But we can control Shadow Hawk with the suits from outside the ship, using mental projection," argued Vallnam, "We just set the ship on a course we want, and then each of us flies out and latches onto one UFO.  We get them to destroy the fourth ship, and crash the other three, and then we fly back to Shadow Hawk and head back to Earth nice, nice." 

They thought it over it very carefully.

"I don't feel it is right to send them flying into the moon this way," said Ling, finally.  "If we are cornered or there is no other choice, then we should fight, and fight to win, definitely.  But I don't think I can commit to using Mental Assimilation to cause them to kill themselves, though I won't stop you from doing so, if you feel it is the right thing to do.  But for me, it is too cruel a use of this power."

"Ok, that's fine, but if that's the case, what do you suggest we do with the fourth ship that we can't control?"

"No, no," said Ling, "I could control one ship and convince it that nothing is happening, while you two do whatever you're going to do.  I don't know," she said, exasperated by the moral dilemma. 

"So, you will keep one ship occupied and thinking everything is fine, while we take out the fourth ship with our two, and then after we crash ours into the moon, we take over yours and crash that one?"

"I don't know," said Ling, disturbed by the prospect of killing the Nazis in such a profoundly sinister fashion, regardless of how cruel they themselves had been. She had grave reservations about it. "I just won't partake in an action that will cause them to kill themselves or each other.  I won't prevent you, but I won't do it."   Deep within Shadow Hawk, the Virtue Mind hummed quietly.  

Having made this decision, Vallnam and Jacob decided to proceed with their plan.  Ling would guide one ship innocuously, while he and Jacob would take care of business.  "So it's a bit more hoop jumping, but at least it keeps your moral compass, somewhat clean."

She struggled with this.  It felt wrong.  But the problem was that they had two ships behind them filled to the brim with the Nazi Technicians they had rescued.  These were not bad people, she thought, they just had the misfortune to be born into a situation they had no chance of escaping. The four UFOs, on the other hand, were being flown by combat hardened Nazi Military Officers from Ludendorf's Command.  When the technicians encountered them, who could doubt they would be destroyed?  The technicians could barely fly their ships.  After all, what other reaction would the Nazi warriors have but to conclude that the Technicians hijacked the UFOs and were fleeing to Earth while Eisenhelm was engaged in a Civil War?  They'd be practically certain to attack. Even if they could use the Mental Assimilation to hide the presence of the two UFOs the Technicians were flying, they could only do so for three of the four combatant UFOs. She couldn't see a way around the need to deal with the combatants as Vallnam and Jacob suggested.  But she still couldn't bring herself to be so cruel, either.  She was flummoxed and sat in silence.

"Ultimately, we want to save the technicians," said Vallnam. "And besides, if we let the UFOs land safely on the moon, what do you think is going to happen then?  We will be adding to Hanna's military force, and in the end, they're going to come back and wreck havoc on Federation Command.  Remember, those UFOs have weaponry that is far more powerful than anything we have on Earth right now. They could use that power to dominate what remains of civilization.  The only reason they haven't done so already is because they've been hiding out on the moon so long that they lost their initiative.  And it's only been a few years since the Ultra-War, and they probably don't have a clear idea of how weakened civilization has become.  But now, with Eisenhelm destroyed, everything has changed.  We can't take the risk."

While this was certainly the pragmatic point of view, and one shared whole hearted by Jacob, it was nevertheless still just too ruthless for Ling.  

Shadow Hawk's Minds conferred on the matter, debating among the three the moral implications.  Mercy felt that there was no deterministic guarantee that the Nazis in the four UFOs would necessarily attack the Technicians, nor was it necessarily the case that they would definitely pose a future threat to Earth.  Virtue thought there was at least some possibility that the Moon Nazis might do neither of these things, although she admitted the probability was rather small.  But still, thought Mercy, terminating lives for uncertain rationales was not something that could be easily condoned, even if the chances were that Jacob and Vallnam were right.  The Modroni, after all, might be cold-blooded alien scientists from a distant world, but they imbued Shadow Hawk with a consciousness that was humane in the deepest sense of the word. She didn't like bloodshed, and didn't like being the cause of it. And besides, pointed out Wisdom, violent occurrences always carry with them forensic evidence of one sort or another.  It was practically a universal law.  And races of far superior intellect than the humans could potentially de-code such forensics and with sufficient mental effort unwind the evidence to the point where they would detect an inexplicable hole in the data.  What caused four UFOs to suddenly, and inexplicably attack one another, and then crash into the moon?  Proper analysis would undoubtedly reveal that the UFOs exhibited no technical malfunctions. And that left a hole in any truly rational examination of what happened.  One that a few races in the galaxy could, potentially, find sufficiently perplexing to pursue, should they ever happen to investigate these events.  And despite the unbelievably low probability of this ever occurring, the three Minds of Shadow Hawk nevertheless were in perfect agreement: it was a problem.

"What do you think Jacob?"

"I don't object strongly to any of this, at this point," he replied.  "We need to make sure the UFOs don't threaten the technicians, or Earth.  They need a pounding, and we can give it to them."

They decided to execute the plan. But first, they had to ensure the safety of the technicians. Ling opened a telepathic link into the two technician UFOs that were wobbling their way along behind them.  In fact, the two ships were flying far too close to each other, and at dangerous angles, but somehow they were managing to keep from crashing into one another, barely.  Certainly, the inexperienced technicians were getting the ultimate crash course in the of piloting Nazi UFOs.  It wasn't as impossible as it may seem. After all, they built them, and knew exactly to the detail how they worked.  Their problem was that they had never actually flown one, and had no actual piloting experience. But somehow they were managing.  

"This is a Commander from Jacob's Team," announced Ling telepathically to two members of each ship.  She also linked to Jacob and Vallnam.  "We are communicating with you via our Telepathic technology."  The four technicians were amazed.  They listened intently.

"Ja, amazing, amazing!" the technicians were saying to themselves, overawed.

"We are going to engage with the Saucers that are on their way to destroy us, so you need to go into Stealth mode before we come within range of their sensors."

"Vhat are you going to do?" asked one of the technicians.

"That is top secret at this time," said Vallnam.

"Did you say they are going to destroy us?" asked another technician.

"Yes," replied Vallnam.

"Vhy vould zhey do zis?" came the puzzled reply from one of the other technicans.

"They were ordered to attack hijacked ships leaving Eisenhelm," replied Ling.

"Exactly," said Vallnam. "We don't want to take any chances."

The technicians were puzzled by all of this. They hadn't heard those orders.  As far as they knew, the four UFOs had been sent to recapture the one UFO that had been hijacked earlier that day from Hanger A.  But this was before the Civil War had begun, and things could easily have changed, they reasoned, so it was possible.  Still, the situation was confusing. Nevertheless, they remained quiet.  Arguing with superiors was not in their nature, nor their training.  They were born and bred to obey, which they did as a matter of habit.

"All of this was caused by the rebellion. The UFO Captains were ordered to destroy all ships leaving Eisenhelm," said Ling in her most diplomatically persuasive tone.  She sounded so sincere the technicians lost all sense of puzzlement and became convinced that whatever Ling said was definitely the truth.  They had no doubt about it.

With the utmost stealth, Shadow Hawk sped in a wide arc behind the four UFOs.  Using the Helio-Drive at an accelerating speed, she skimmed along the magnetic currents flowing out from the Sun, and by careful shifting of their polarity at the right times, Jacob maneuvered the magnificent vessel so that it came up behind their prey undetected.  While the Nazi UFOs had amazing maneuverability due to their Red-Mercury Plasma Drives, and could execute hairpin turns at impossible speeds, Shadow Hawk's Helio-Drive could accelerate to nearly up to light-speed in a few moments. And this without ruffling of the continuum due to the Helio-Drive's spacetime warping cocoon, nor disturbing spacetime within the vessel itself.  It slid along the magnetic waves without the slightest hint of a ripple.  Thus, no sensors known to science could detect it.

As soon as they matched speed and trajectory, Vallnam and Jacob hovered their fingers over their respective control consoles.  A soft blue-green light emanated from symbols that they could not read, but somehow understood.  The chairs in which they sat hummed, and as smooth as melted chocolate spreads over the surface of a bowl, they were enveloped in their armored suits: "Wisdom" and "Mercy".  They felt perfectly warm, comfortable, could breathe easily, and found that they could see all around themselves in every direction without having to move their heads. 

In a moment, without realizing how, they found themselves outside Shadow Hawk floating in free space.  Silently they projected mentally where they wanted to go, and their suits initiated the Helios-Drive protocol.  They were instantly on their way at remarkable speed, carving a vast arc along the Sun's magnetic lines of force.  It was quite a bit like surfing.  When they needed to change direction the suits altered polarity.  They smoothly glided toward the UFOs that had been pursuing them fruitlessly for the past 15 hours.   

Jacob had taken to flying like he was born to it, twirling in spirals as he flew, and was truly enjoying himself.  Vallnam on the other hand was not quite as fluent in flight, struggling to will himself to the exact location he wished, and gliding in simple curves without flourishes.  Once they got near the UFOs, Jacob pointed to the closest, indicating for Vallnam to take charge of that one, while Jacob flew off to match speed and trajectory with the further one.  Ling remained inside Shadow Hawk, and flew to a position one thousand feet behind the last one in the set.  They left the leading UFO unattended. This was the one they had designated for doom.

Sliding effortlessly along Earth's magnetic field lines, Jacob located an interference wave, and with a gentle shifting of polarity, slipped over the top, slid down the other side, and within moments he was positioned directly next to UFO-3, flying alongside of them.  Within were three hardened Nazi Spacemen.  One stood at the helm piloting the craft, another at the navigation station, and the third manned the weapons platform.  All of them were tired from their long ordeal, and bewildered by the strange events that had recently thrown their normally orderly world into complete disarray.  Adding to their anxiety, all communications with Eisenhelm had ceased.

"Captain Keller," Lieutenant Kruger was saying, "I still am unable to raise Eisenhelm.  All zee frequencies are dead.  There is only static. It is as if zee Fortress is... no longer there." 

"This is impossible, Lieutenant.  Keep trying," ordered the Captain coolly.  "Still, zee first order of business is to locate zee hijacked UFO that has escaped us.  Vee vill soon know who zee traitors are.  They vill have to come out of Stealth Mode before landing.  Vee vill catch them then and annihilate them!"

Jawul, Captain!" replied the Lieutenant.  

Fortunately, Shadow Hawk, and the suits, for all practical purposes, were completely invisible in space.  She cannot be detected by any known sensors, radar, or other tools of science.  Her color is of a black so deep that it absorbs 99.9999% of light when in the depths of space. However, she could also change to her color scheme to whatever blends most perfectly with whatever background in space she finds herself in, whether it be a nebula, a star, a moon, or even the multichromatic colors of a planet.  Shadow Hawk was designed to be unobservable. 

Consequently, the only way the Nazi crews might have been able to detect her would have been by virtue of her occulting a star, which would, at those speeds, happen only for a moment and extremely rarely.  It would take uncanny observational powers for them to notice.  As the UFOs only had tiny round port windows made of thick glass, and tired and listless crews, the chances of them noticing Shadow Hawk or any of the suits was astronomically small.  And none of them did.  And so, the Nazis within the four combat UFOs had absolutely no clue that they would soon be engaged in a battle that none of them could possibly have anticipated or prepared for.

Ling cast the first Mental Assimilation.  She enveloped the crew in a mental vision of nothing unusual happening at all.  Nothing changed.  And no matter what might go on around them among the other UFOs, this crew would only see normal instrument readings, and their comrades flying alongside of them on the long boring trip back to the moon.  Their minds were completely encased in this vision, and to the end not a single one of them had the slightest suspicion that anything was amiss at all.

Vallnam cast the second Mental Assimilation.  

"Captain! Look!" shouted a Lieutenant.  Ahead of them where the lead UFO was located they saw a bright flash of orange light, and the crew members completely believed that the ship exploded into a thousand pieces. Through its wreckage roared a fabulously sleek bullet-shaped Spaceship, bristling with rocket launchers and beam ray cannons, emblazoned on the side was a large bright American flag.  The warship's chrome hull gleaming brightly at the head of its bright yellow plasma trail, while through the large round portholes the Nazis could see sneering American spacemen laughing with delight, and frothing with villainous ecstasy.  It was astonishing!   

At that moment a crackling sound erupted over their radio speakers, and the Nazis heard the following: "You will be crushed you Nazi Scum!  America is the most powerful nation in the universe, and we are now going to destroy you next!"

"Ach-TUNG!  RED ALERT! ATTACK! ATTACK!" stormed Captain Keller at the top of his lungs, thunderstruck by the sudden and completely inexplicable appearance of the Americans.  The crew snapped to stations and immediately began attacking the imaginary vessel.  But what their weapons trained on was instead the lead UFO of their battle group, the crew of which had simply no idea that anything untoward was about to happen to them.  Somewhere not terribly far off, a dog-shaped black cloud moved closer to UFO-1 with relish in its black heart.

Meanwhile, the four technicians who were still telepathically linked to Ling, Jacob and Vallnam's minds, were being blown away by the incredible prowess of their new leaders.  Who could ever imagine that war could be fought in such a fashion!?  It was astounding!

Realizing that the technicians were still mentally tethered to the conversation, Vallnam put the following out there to them.  "Ja!  So now you see, finally, what incredible technology zee Reich has secretly developed over all zee years in Eisenhelm.  You must keep it an absolute secret -- to zee grave!"  To this all four technicians agreed without the slightest hesitation, so overawed were they. 

Having landed lightly on the hull of the third ship moments before, Jacob had already cast his Mental Assimilation within.  The miserable Nazi crew suddenly saw a very similar scene ahead of them, with the lead UFO being sliced clean in half by a dazzling crimson beam of light.  Shocked, they clambered to the port window -- the attacker was the head of the Statue of Liberty herself, her eyes blazing with crackling red lightning, and bright red plasma beams emitting from each of her crown's spikes!  From her mouth emitted a forked tongue, while from the base of her neck a huge blue-white jet of fire propelled the monstrous space-weapon through the UFOs imaginary wreckage directly toward them!  What the hell?!!

Again there was an instant call to arms within, and this ship's crew fought just as fiercely as the other.  Now both Mind Assimilated UFOs were aiming their Liquid Metal Projectile weapons and firing upon the completely docile and unsuspecting leader UFO-1.  Within, one crew member was scratching the back of his neck, yawning over a cup of cold tea, and looking lazily out the port window at the infinitely boring starscape around them.  Another was trying to stay busy polishing the brass knobs on his control panel.  Captain Reiner stifled a yawn as he gazed listlessly at his shoes.

Suddenly there was a flash of light and the ship shook violently. The port window cracked and threatened to give way. Sparks sprayed out from a control panel and filled the air with streaks of orange embers.  The ship's hull made terrible creaking sounds as it began to tear apart.  The pilot was thrown to the ground, while the others buckled in and grabbed their controls.  They weren't going to go down without a fight!   But who was attacking them!?

"Captain!" shouted the ship's lieutenant from the weapons station, "zee traitors are among our own fleet!  Vee are being attacked by two traitor ships from behind!"

"Vhat?!" shouted Captain Reiner, shocked to the core by this outrageous treachery, his face twisting with spasms of hysterical hatred. 

"ATTACK!  ATTACK YOU FOOLS!!"  He had always known that Captain Keller was unspeakably jealous of his higher rank in the UFO Fleet, and viciously vindictive over the way he had commandeered his delectable lover, Eva von Strauss the previous year, but he never imagined such a brazen response from an insignificant lesser officer!  It was unheard of!  He must surely die!  

"Radio UFO-4!  Order zee counter attack! Destroy them immediately!  Raimund! Man zee Lightning Cannon!!"  shouted Captain Reiner at the top of his lungs.

All to no avail. While the radio message was sent to UFO-4, the crew within never heard a thing, and remained blissfully ignorant of the battle raging around them.  Ling was sailing along behind them at a discreet distance, ensuring that the only thing they heard and saw was the long dull path back to the moon etched in blinking blips across their sensor screen, and the blissfully boring silence of the starry night.

That first barrage had struck UFO-1 with a stream of super-heated metal projectiles, grazing the ship's side, carving open its weapons port, severely damaging the port side window, and sheering off its lateral antenna array.  In a moment the ship veered wildly to the starboard, just in time, as a liquid metal stream from UFO-3 slipped past it, missing barely, and vanishing in a long glowing line of metal pellets into the depths of space.  

The Nazis of UFO-1, arguably the best trained crew in the brigade, fought back with a vengeance.  Vallnam and Jacob cleverly sent their respective crews images of their opponents shooting back, but missing due to poor aim.  The Nazis crews cheered as the imaginary weapons missed their targets and sailed off harmlessly into the void.  

"ATTACK!!  ATTACK THE AMERICAN SWINE AGAIN!! DESTROY THEM!!" shouted Captain Keller, frothing at the mouth with excitement.

Jacob asked if there was a Shadow Hawk weapon they might use to get a shot in and end the melee, but Vallnam thought better of it.  "No, I don't think we should do that.  We should keep projecting bravado and menace until they destroy each other," he said, recalling the strong impression that they should try remain as stealthy at all times as possible.  Jacob assented to this recommendation, and so they continued their mental assault from a safe distance as the ships tore into each other.  

The battle didn't last long.  In two quick sorties it was all over.  UFO-1 was obliterated; Reiner and his crew torn to shreds by their hallucinating comrades-in-arms.  The once clean and efficient control cabin, now devoid of air and utterly silent, was strewn with flying bits of glass, smoke, burning debris, and floating bodies.  

Through one of the holes in the hull flitted a malignant shadow.  It paused to savor its prey, and then savagely devoured the souls of the Nazi soldiers who died therein, far, far, far from home.  Their horrific screams could not be heard in this world, as their tattered memories, dreams, petty jealousies, victories, and grand romances were all sucked into the infinitely black maw of the Wiedergänger.  It darted from one to the other, gleeful with hate to the last.  It was growing fat on the victories that Vallnam wrought along its way.  Because of this, it intended to stay loyally, if invisibly, by Vallnam's side... until some black night when the pitiful human would also fall prey to the way of all flesh.  Delicious he shall be, thought the Wiedergänger with a peculiar alien relish.

Vallnam caused the crew within UFO-2 to believe that they witnessed the imaginary American ship crack and glow white hot from within, while over the radio they heard screaming "You cannot defeat America!  We'll be back!!  AHHGGGHHH!" a moment before the imaginary Space Cruiser exploded into a billion glowing shards.  Jacob's crew saw a similar fate, the head of the Statue of Liberty being blasted into pieces by their Liquid Metal Cannon.  In Ling's ship, however, things remained dull to the point of bordom.  One of the men lit a cigarette, while another checked the radar for signs of the hijacked UFO that they had been chasing for so long.  No sign of it, yet, he reported without enthusiasm.  

"Ling," said Vallnam, "why don't you keep your crew steady as she goes.  We'll get ours to increase speed and fly with them to the moon."

Meanwhile, the technicians were aghast.  The insidiousness of the attack that the four technicians were privy to via their telepathic link was utterly shocking.  They explained what they were witnessing to the rest of their crews, and all of them were terrified of the powers that their commanders possessed.  It was truly horrifying.  They were awestruck and sat in silence.  One of them passed out, having been previously wounded during the escape from Hanger B, and unable to take any additional stress.  He collapsed on a bench, clutching the wound on his neck.  The technician next to him found a blanket in the slide-cubby and put it over him.

A half hour later, under Vallnam and Jacob's clandestine influence, UFO-2 and UFO-3 crashed unwittingly at high speed into the surface of the moon, thinking that they had more than ample time to slow down before Eisenhelm's Hanger C came within range of an orbital flight path adjustment.   

"Steady as she ---" Captain Keller was saying at the moment of his unexpected demise.  

Satisfied that there could be no survivors, Vallnam and Jacob flew back to Shadow Hawk.  

Behind them, one by one, the infernal screams of eight Nazi souls being consumed might be heard, if one had ears attuned to the realm of spirits, demons, and the phase dimension.

As they flew back to Shadow Hawk, Vallnam thought about Ling, his beloved treasure.  He understood where she was coming from in regards to not getting her hands dirty taking out the Nazis.  He wouldn't argue with her about this, and just shrugged to himself.  She had a moral compass that wouldn't let her cross that line, he thought, even though the deed had to be done.  He loved her, and was willing to look the other way at what he inwardly thought was really a kind of moral cowardice.  After all, what was the difference if she killed them, or merely allowed he and Jacob to do so.  Either way, the Nazis were, rightfully, dead.  The only difference really is that she declined to pull the trigger herself.  In his heart of hearts he thought about this, and in the end, his love for her prevailed and so he concluded that she had done the right thing, though he couldn't explain exactly why he thought so.  No matter.  Where love prevails, reason has no primacy.

Ling sat in Shadow Hawk, quietly guiding UFO-4 on their journey back to Eisenhelm. The crew surmised that wherever the renegade UFO they had been tracking had gone, it was now quite beyond their capability to find. They'd given up that hope, and assumed the ship had landed somewhere on Earth, or sped off in stealth mode out into space.  It could be anywhere by now.  In any case, they were looking forward to getting home, soaking their feet in a hot bath, and getting some much deserved R&R. 

Observing their languid behavior, Ling wondered just how incalcitrant the Nazis really were.  Was there any chance they could have been reformed toward a better, brighter future on Earth? Did they really have to be killed?  Could they have had a change of heart? After all, Hanna, for a moment, had almost succumbed to Jacob's charms.  She might have turned, had it not been for her completely unreasonable fit of jealousy when she saw Ling for the first time.  But still, perhaps the Nazis could be reformed.  She wondered if they were doing the right thing.  

But that wasn't really at the heart of what was bothering her, either. In Ling's mind, the reason they shouldn't have waged this kind of attack was because they were now so vastly overpowered compared to their opponents that the contest was completely unfair.  It was like shooting fish in a barrel.  What chance did the Nazis even have?  Zero.  None.  It reminded her of a passage she had read in a book on medieval history many years before the Ultra-War, regarding Emperor Charlemagne's Prohibition against the use of bows and arrows for his Paladins.  He made the edict on the grounds that the use of missile weapons to slay one's enemies at a distance was dishonorable and cowardly.  The Emperor desired that all Paladins cultivate virtue and honor above all else.  This was for the sake of their immortal souls, and to ensure God's favor upon his Empire.  When she thought of this, she shuddered at just how effective, and ruthless, the three heroes could become, having been granted the vast powers of Shadow Hawk.  And the following thought which came upon its heels was that in the wrong hands, such a ship could give any three people the ability to easily tyrannize an entire world. A cold tingling sensation prickled the hairs on the back of her neck as she considered the grave responsibility the three of them had been handed.

Outside her window and invisible dog-shaped shadow was observing her from the void.

Yet to Jacob and Vallnam, they had simply used an advanced form of technology in a military situation to spread misinformation that caused the enemy to remove themselves from the battlefield.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It was a perfunctory use of superior technology to solve a military problem. They felt they were not sadistic about it, the deaths of their enemies being nearly instantaneous and therefore more or less painless, and ultimately, they felt they had to save the technicians whom they considered innocents under their protection, as well as reduce the risk that the enemy would reconstitute itself under Hanna's capable command and threaten Earth with the incredibly well armed UFO Fleet in the future.  Moral equivocations aside, they felt they had done the right thing. 

Shadow Hawk herself pondered the question with great interest.  Humans, she was discovering, were more complex creatures than she had anticipated, and their moral perspectives would not be easily mapped to the Modroni alignment matrix.  She would have to contemplate this further.  Deep within Shadow Hawk the soft golden hum continued for some time.

Vallnam took over UFO-4 from Ling.  Soon, that ship, mysteriously as the other two, crashed into Hanger C, ignited the fuel tanks there, and exploded with a massive concussion that blew out the walls of the hanger exposing its cavernous interior to the lunar surface, and the cold hard vacuum of space.  All of the soldiers who had been holed up there preparing for their next assault on Level B-7 perished in that terrific explosion.  

Hanna, from deep within Doctor Capek's Robotics Laboratory, felt the shock of the crash and subsequent massive explosion, and were it not for her Duridium suit she might have been harmed by the falling rocks and debris that attended the incident.  Another of her Commandoes was not so lucky, and now she was down to two.  Fortunately, the Robots that Doctor Capek had at his disposal instantly protected him from harm, and he was safe.  So too was Hanna's mysterious prisoner. 

When doctor Capek locked eyes on the man in the yellow prison suit the two glared at one another with the ferocity of twin tigers, ready for battle.  Except one was a free man with tools, and weapons, and robots at his command.  The other was a prisoner, cuffed and defenseless - except for what was in that man's unfathomable mind.  Their eyes locked and bored into each other with a wordless ferocity so intense that it caused the metal table Capek was braced against to bend, and collapse.  He fell backwards to the ground.  The prisoner stood over him, his eyes shining.  But that's another story.

Our heroes turned away from the moon and flew swiftly on the magnetic force waves back to Shadow Hawk.  Ling sat brooding in silence.  But the men congratulated themselves on a job well done, and looked forward to their next step on the journey back home.  They summoned the technicians to bring forward their UFOs, and as a group they recalibrated their trajectory toward Earth.  Again Shadow Hawk remained at an unbearably slow velocity in order to stay with the UFOs.  

However, another matter faced them before they could complete the journey.  Ahead of them, sailing silently through space on a trajectory towards Earth, were the fifty inert and lifeless hunks of Giant Nuclear Missile Robot known as "The Phallanx".  In each one contained a five-hundred megaton Cobalt Bomb, designed to produce enhanced amounts of radioactive fallout, and was intended to contaminate an enormous area with radioactive material. Collectively they formed the Nazi's ultimate doomsday weapon, and were intended to cause such widespread and long-lasting devastation as to exterminate all life on planet Earth.  It was Hitler's final order to the Commanders of Eisenhelm:  If he should perish during the war, they were to unleash hell on Earth as a final revenge against all the living.  

Fortunately for Earth, Eisenhelm was cut off from communications with German Military Command at the end of the war, and the Commanders of Eisenhelm were never informed if Hitler had died, or if he were still alive, but in hiding, perhaps in Argentina, or in a secret base in Antarctica as rumors had it.  For Eisenhelm, Hitler's fate remained an unresolved mystery.  Since they didn't know, they chose to do nothing and wait for further orders.  And so, for ninety long years the great secret Moon-Fortress Eisenhelm lay hidden beneath Mare Frigoris, awaiting the final orders which never came, and festering with rivalries,  deceptions, and enormously pent up hatreds.  In the end, Eisenhelm was destroyed by the clever antics of two American Mentarians and a wily Warlock from Arizona who triggered the final solution to their problems.  Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men... 

At any rate, our heroes realized they had to deal with The Phallanx.  Even though the Giant Nuclear Missile Robots had been disabled by the Self-Destruct sequence that Ling had entered into Hertling's top secret Robot Control Computer, the nuclear weapons within them were nevertheless still a significant threat to Earth.  Should the robots fall into the atmosphere and strike mountain sides or cities, the results would be a nuclear devastation far worse than anything that had previously befallen humanity during the Ultra-War.  It would likely be the end for their home world.  They could not leave the robots floating towards Earth.  Something had to be done.

Vallnam inquired with his suit, but it turned out that Shadow Hawk did not have a tractor beam.  It did, however, have a teleporter.  In fact it was the teleporter that ejected them outside the ship when they had donned their Shadow Hawk armors.  The teleporter was, however, only sufficient to teleport a human-sized object, or smaller, somewhere within a hundred miles of Shadow Hawk, and had to be line-of-sight with the ship. Beyond that distance the beam would lose coherency. It didn't seem useful for the current situation. They sought other ideas.

"We could use the UFOs weapons to blow up the robots," suggested Vallnam. 

This however was met with immediate disapproval.  After all, the UFOs to effectively trigger the bombs with their weapons would have to be so close as to be completely vaporized by the first detonation. So that was out.

"Well, even if we can't blow them up, perhaps we can use the weaponry to change their trajectory so that they won't fall into Earth's gravity.  Maybe we could get them to fall into the sun instead," offered Vallnam as an alternative.

"Unfortunately," said Jacob, "given the mass of those robots, and the kinds of weapons the UFOs have, I don't think we're likely to be able to change their trajectory sufficiently for them to escape Earth's gravitational pull.  They are already set on a course to Earth, and each one must weigh at least fifty tons. The UFOs have liquid metal cannons, lightning cannons, and a plasma beam.  None of those would do the trick.  As for getting them to fall into the sun, it's actually much harder than you'd think."

"Perhaps we could get the technicians to nudge the robots off course?" asked Ling.  "Maybe they could land the UFOs on the Robots and use their thrusters to move them off course?"

"Ja," said one of the technicians through the telepathic link. "Vee could.  Some of us worked on zee robots.  If they are tampered with they are designed with booby traps to cause them to explode, but these are likely to be disabled by zee self-destruct code.  It has made their brains inert, along with their electronic mechanisms."

"If we can get one to explode," offered a technician, "they are close enough to each other to cause a chain reaction.  Perhaps they vill all explode."   

"Let's do that," said Vallnam.

"Maybe," said one of the technicians, "but zee robots are such a grand technical achievement.  It seems a shame to destroy them.  Ja, doesn't it?"

"But compared with the fantastic Reich war-technology you just witnessed, the robots are insignificant," replied Vallnam.

"Still, though," the technician persisted, "zee robots can be quite useful."

"For what?" asked Jacob.

"Building things, moving things. They can be amazing work horses, ja."

"But they are going to blow up the Earth," objected Vallnam.

"Not if we remove zee bombs," said the technician with a wry intonation.

"That presumes we can land on the robots, and do all that," argued Jacob.

"Vee can do that," said the technician. "Vee can fly zee UFOs to each robot, with our spacesuits vee can go out and work on them.  After all, vee built zee robots.  Vee know their design.  Vee can remove zee bombs, reprogram zee brains, and reactive zee robots to be great giant work horses for zee Earth peoples!  It would give us something to offer when vee arrive.  Otherwise, vee are just lowly refugees with no status at all.  Refugees in a strange land. But with zee robots, vee can bring a coming home gift of great value.  Fifty of them, even, ja."

They thought this over.  Vallnam proposed that they try with one.

"If you can get one done, and don't blow yourselves to smithereens, and it doesn't take too long, then it's okay with me."

"When we get to Earth," another technician asked, "vill you be able to negotiate a place for us?  After all that has happened, maybe they vill convict us after all?  Vee have been enemies for a long time, ja?"

"Your contributions will be accounted for, and held to your credit," said Jacob confidently.  "We should have no problem advocating for you among the Earth people, don't worry."

The technicians were puzzled at the idea that their High Nazi High Commanders, the three purple bubble-suit leaders who rescued them from certain death in the disintegrating Eisenhelm, would also have so much influence on Earth that they could persuade the Earth people to accept them.  They still had no inkling that Ling, Vallnam and Jacob were actually Americans posing as Moon-Nazis.  Nor did they fathom that it was their machinations that ignited the Nazi Civil War within Eisenhelm to begin with, and that these three were responsible for the grand base's ultimate destruction.   Or perhaps by then some of them had slowly begun to subconsciously guess, but none of them had thought so consciously up to that point.  It would come as a great shock to many of them, for sure.

"Vill you surrender to the Americans when vee get there?" asked the technician.  "What vill vee to do when vee arrive?"

"We will assimilate into their society.  It makes no sense to fight a war with the Americans now.  Eisenhelm is over.  We can live on Earth and forget the past."

"Ah, ja, that we could," said the technicians, thoughtfully.  While they were brought up under Nazi dominion for their entire lives, the technicians were the Nazi underclass, and their betters never let them forget it for a moment.  They had no great love for the Reich after so many years of abuse and degradation.  Secretly they had all wished they could return to the beautiful blue planet and live normal lives among trees and oceans with blowing air, and rain and blue skies.  If their High Commanders had in mind to surrender so that they could do this, the technicians were most definitely not going to object to that.  They felt a great relief, in fact, as they thought that they were being taken along in order to wage a final futile battle against the Earthlings with their two UFOs.  This came as a wonderful surprise to most of them.

Ling realized at that point that the technicians who had lived their entire lives on the moon would be facing some very significant challenges once they landed on Earth.  For one thing, their muscles were not nearly strong enough to carry their weight, so they would not be able to walk.  They also were likely to be vulnerable to Earth diseases, and especially to the many pathogens released during the Ultra-War.  They would also have a hard time, most likely, adjusting to the change in atmosphere and food.  Not to mention the culture shock they would inevitably encounter.  But, somehow, she knew they would work it out one way or another.  Medical science had advanced tremendously since the Nazis founded Eisenhelm in 1943.  Federation Command would find a way to acclimate them Earth.  And they had a skill set that would prove quite valuable to Earth civilization.  Federation Command was always eager to accept skilled technicians into their ranks.

"Let us try to fix zee Phallanx," said the new lead technician.  "But in case things go wrong, all of you should move a good distance away.  If one explodes, then the vill all explode, ja.  Zee burst you could see from Jupiter, I think, ja?  But vee are villing to try."

Because they were linked telepathically to four of the technicians, the Mentarians knew that their hearts were sincere, and they did not have a nefarious plan up their sleeves. So this idea was agreed to, and one of the UFOs with its nine technicians flew closer, and landed on the lead Giant Nuclear Powered Robot.  

Two of the technicians climbed out, and the entire group of ships rapidly retreated to a position eight hundred miles away, which they deemed would likely be far enough.  The technicians continued to converse with them via the telepathic link.  They opened the tools compartment on the side of the robot, tethered themselves to it via a steel cable, and began their work steadily and with great care.  After a half hour they notified the team that they were stuck on a fail-safe mechanism, and were having trouble bypassing it.  They asked for more time to try again.  This was granted, and they tried again.  

"Aha," said one of the technicians  "Vee have disconnected zee cobalt bomb, and are going to float it out of the robot hull.  Then vee vill attempt to reprogram zee robot.  The bomb disconnection was the easy part. Vee vill try."

After fifteen minutes, "No, it failed.  Vee vill try again."

After several tries, they couldn't find a way around the security system that blocked their ability to reprogram the robot. They were defeated and asked for their UFO to pick them up.  Once back aboard, they went into a rapid-fire white boarding session with their team, seeing if between all of them they could figure out a way to get passed the security mechanism.  It was a toughy.

"Oh it is a shame that Hans and Nick didn't make it!" they lamented.  "Zee robots are our ticket to acceptance into Earth society! Without them, vee vill be less than nobodies!  At best vee vill have zee status of refugees and former enemies with nothing to show for ourselves. Vee must find a way past zee security mechanism!  Verflixt!  Alas, Nick would have known how to do it instantly!"

The unconscious technician wrapped in a blanket toward at the rear of the ship stirred in fitful feverish dreams. His lips were working, but no words came out of his mouth. The wound on his neck was a small dark red gash, which had been slowly becoming infected.  He moaned, but the technicians were too absorbed in their work to take notice.


And that is where we left it that game.