Boating
- Location
- USA
I made it down the hill to the sidewalk two blocks away just as a self-driving cab rolled to a stop in front of me.
"All monitoring systems are under my control," Pooja said in my ear.
The trunk popped open. I threw my luggage in, slammed it shut, and got into the back seat—careful not to damage anything with my bulky armor. I checked how events were progressing on my AR display against the back of the front seats. Emergency services starting to arrive at all locations. Video of fire shooting out of windows at two locations, the third surrounded by police with drawn guns. Fires weren't spreading outside the lots. Good. No bystanders seemed to be in any immediate danger.
Not that no one had been killed. Three- no, four people dead so far. One of the attackers hadn't made it out of the civilian ID's house before it exploded. None had made it out of my secret lair.
Technically, Pooja had killed them, not me.
Good for her.
They'd come at us, armed, invading homes, and without warning or negotiation. Fuck 'em. I'd have done it myself. Ordered Pooja to do it, even if she wasn't ready and willing to kill to protect me—which she clearly was.
Was that dark? Did that make me or Pooja a bad person? Was she suddenly a rampaging AI with no morals?
Ha. Yeah, no. I didn't have three hours to construct a lecture to myself on the morality of self defense. A lecture I didn't need, and Pooja likely had hard-coded.
I had fucking Sun Tzu'd this shit ahead of time. I knew myself. I knew my enemy. I wasn't going down easy because I got stupid and avoided immediately escalating. They came into a killing field when I was cut off from retreat. They had guns and supertech. I had more guns and better supertech. I won.
Sure, I could and would lie to other people, but not myself. I knew this wasn't some DC universe influence driving me to villainy—some ghost of the past, much more classically-criminal me. I wasn't some self-sacrificing hero in any universe, and I'd had this internal debate before my current odd situation made it truly relevant. I'd mentally prepared and planned for self defense scenarios, even if this was the most dramatic actual event I'd been through.
I wasn't going to beat myself up over this. I'd done the right thing. My mind was clear. My thoughts fast, focused. It wasn't even all due to the smart drugs. I smoothed the snarl off my face with conscious effort, working the tightness out of my jaw, fists loose, flexing my fingers then cracking my knuckles with loud pops.
"Okay Pooja, here's how we're going to escape from L.A." I flicked through the screens on my AR glasses, constructing a plan both simple and effective.
It didn't primarily involve shooting Slade Wilson, but that was a strong target of opportunity.
The Marina del Rey harbor is the world's largest man-made harbor for yachts. Lex Luthor has the world's largest single-masted, sloop-rigged super yacht anchored there in a huge birth. The mast towered thirty stories high. He must have been paying absurd amounts of money for that.
As I strolled casually along the edge of the parking lot, towards the individually locked gates protecting the boats, I tapped my fingers across a railing, seeing in my glasses things that didn't exist. Records showed Lex doesn't use it more than once a year. And it likely had the best security of any boat in the Marina. The lock clicked in front of me and I swung it open like I belonged here.
Screw it. I closed the info windows with a flick of my finger. It's not like I wanted to steal the stupid thing anyway. Too much heat. My frown only disappeared after Pooja finished confusing my trail via the poorly secured harbor records and pulled out past the breakwaters into open ocean on our stolen luxury motor yacht.
Pooja had selected this boat by comparing how likely it was to be missed against its advantageous features. The sporty little multi-decker, twenty-meter, three cabin boat had a high-tech, fully electronic piloting system and an owner out of state.
Despite the weather, I was still wearing my suit with full trench coat over it. I wished I'd designed the power suit with internal temperature management system. Paper-thin liquid cooling panels could have kept me comfortable as I hid in the pilothouse and waited for the AC to kick in.
We turned south, and green constructs dipped into the water on one side out of sight of shore. A net of constructs covered the hull to warn of boarders. The built-in sonar and radar systems were linked to Pooja along with the security cameras, but her reaction times were bad with only satellite connections to her main servers. I loaded several more combat programs onto the power suit just in case.
It looked good so far. I'd made it to the Marina and out on a boat without facing any opposition. I'd figured Slade wouldn't think of either the Calculator or his agents escaping on a boat. And even if he did have some plans, they'd be third-tier and too slow to react with Pooja compromising the entire Marina's security systems.
All traffic in the area of the boat was monitored. Nothing larger than a minnow got close without Pooja's notice. Once out of sight of shore and other ships, the entire boat was quickly covered in spiky, glowing defensive constructs. With nothing productive to do, I took a nap in the captain's cabin.
So, of course, thirty minutes later anti-ship missiles came over the horizon. As I pulled on my gloves and helmet, I listened to Pooja's ongoing reports.
"Four contacts, bearing one-six-four. Likely ship-fired based on profile. Assuming observer drone at extreme altitude. Brace."
Flexible, rounded constructs covered my ears and I hunched down next to the bed, exosuit arms over my helmet and a water survival program loaded and ready to manually trigger. A spiderweb of construct lines filed out the door and ports, connection to systems all over the ship.
When Pooja started firing, I could feel the deafening staccato sound in my chest from the AAA constructs. The boat jerked sideways in the water from the massive barrage of fire. It seemed to go on forever. I watched a constructed virtual image of the huge, glowing, green guns mounted on the decks of the boat, things more fitting to a battleship and spitting out hard light pellets at an absurd rate.
"One missile down," Pooja said. "Boat structural integrity damaged from weapon mounts. Danger! Jamming detec-"
My fingers flicked through the HUD menus. Broadband jamming took out the satellite link. Nothing else currently available. Pooja was out of contact. I manually linked to the AAA gun constructs and loaded the targeting program on my suit.
The boat shook again as I fired, corrected, and fired again. Tracking was mostly automatic but I still needed to target select and manually fire. Couldn't trust this bodged-together system if, say, Wonder Woman's invisible jet suddenly appeared.
I glanced at the cosmic energy charge meter. Power systems were holding for now and it was charging relatively fast. There are stars out even during the day, after all. The Sun, plus others drowned out by its light. The cosmic converter systems worked on non-interacting mystical particles, so it wasn't quite like solar energy. But that didn't mean I could waste it derping around with high-cost munitions like this.
Two down. Now the missiles were juking, dipping and twitching to avoid my fire. This avoidance program hadn't started earlier, likely because Pooja had opened fire at extreme long range and it was timed. Things had gotten significantly more difficult.
I could smell my own sweat in the cold, air-conditioned captain's cabin. The bed dug into my back as I braced my armored feet into the floor. I spared a moment for the navigation system, considered for a long, long second, then turned it toward shore, directly away from the missiles but also away from my objective in San Diego Bay.
I resumed fire again in bursts. Three seconds out. No jamming possible on my side. Couldn't yet get electronic or thermal effects good enough for ECCM, flares, or chaff out of the constructs.
Two seconds out. Got the third.
One second out. Screw burst—I went fully automatic. The boat felt like it was shaking apart. Damage control readout was red, so I guess I was. I triggered the shielding and water survival programs as I continued to fire and a green glow surrounded me and my suitcase.
I was across the room, half-buried in a wall. There had been an explosion, loud, close. My hands shook as I went to review the sensor data.
The fourth missile had impacted on an ablative energy shell, but the explosion wasn't fully contained. Cameras showed scorch marks and scattered shrapnel on the front left quarter of the hull.
I had at least ten minutes to shore; even if I just wanted to run it up on the beach that was too far. Another wave of missiles was likely. Using the boat to travel was still more energy efficient than flying—and likely safer, too—so I dug constructs into the water, formed streamlined screws, and poured on the speed.
Second wave, right on time. This was a little much. Who had this sort of munitions? This was military stuff. I checked the readout Pooja had download to my suit. These missiles were usually mounted on Chinese destroyers.
Suitcase in hand, coat on, and still surrounded by a glowing green shell, I exited the cabin and hopped overboard.
I skipped against the waves once, twice, then sank like the world's least prepared wake-boarding enthusiast, my suitcase dragged behind me on a glowing green tether. I trusted the integrity of the construct tying me to the battered yacht while I switched back to my helmet readouts. Manual AAA systems back under my control, I continued to fire on the next four missiles.
Even the suit had learning systems embedded in its programming. Aim was improving. Two exploded in flares of fire, one after the other. I grit my teeth and override the targeting system, firing at too long at the last heading of the second missile. The third slammed into a shield. The boat shook. I hit the defense system override and the fourth missile hit the boat directly, just right of the pilothouse.
The upper deck of the yacht evaporated in a cloud of fire, spraying debris across the waves. Several systems on the boat went dark and I let the glowing green hard-light fade from everywhere but the tether on the bottom of the boat.
Lengthening the line, I sunk lower, extending tethered sensor pods as I went. No sonar, but some of the light spectrum was still good at this depth. When the forward momentum of the boat slowed, I fired up my own screw propeller constructs. As I pulled away from the boat, I maintained a connection to the remaining functional shipboard cameras through constructs strung inside the shattered hull.
And there we go. Back helicopter, no markings of any kind. Two gunmen leaning out the sides.
I was getting to the edge of my range, the tether back to the ship getting a little thin by the time they reached the slowly sinking boat. They immediately opened fire on it with automatic weapons. Feature analysis popped up. Guns were also Chinese military make. Likely stolen. Good enough for me.
Time to play dead now and silently fade. Oh no, you got me. I am finished.
Yeah, fuck that, and fuck them.
I blew the boat apart, firing short-lived lances of green hard-light the size of telephone poles from the hull several hundred meters outward in all directions. It just so happened that the only two non-illusory, actually hard hard-light poles ran straight into the hovering helicopter, blowing apart the motor systems and crew compartment. The largest parts that fell into the ocean met just-constructed underwater mines that exploded into glowing balls of long, sharp spikes, further shredding the wreck, any survivors, and throwing plumes of water high into the air.
It took me down to 20% charge remaining. Worth it.
Short of pissing on their smoking corpses, I think I was just about as done as I could be here. First part of my message sent to whatever asshats thought that was a good idea. My guess was they were from some Chinese, Lex Luthor wannabe. Well now, whether they knew it or not, they were on my list. A list kept and executed by an AI that never slept, curated by a man completely out of fucks to give.
I held at five meters off the seabed, still covered in a construct shell and moving at forty knots from construct force pressure alone—about as fast and as silent as a modern attack sub, and twice as pissed-off.
As I dragged my luggage onto a lonely, rocky shore, Pooja's satellite connection came back up. I was suddenly bristling with outward-facing weapons and sensor pods. I stood absolutely still.
A second later, they retracted and the glow surrounding me faded.
"Good," Pooja said. "I see you are safe. I tracked your initial evasion via satellite observation but it is good to be able to make sure of it directly. Well done with the helicopter."
"Thanks." I blew out a breath and twisted at the waist, servos flexing and black gloved hands on my hips. The crink in my back popped satisfyingly.
"So, Pooja. You hacked a military spy satellite in mere minutes, just for this?"
"No," Pooja replied simply.
"Huh. Okay."
No longer glowing, I dragged my rolling suitcase through the sand, past some idle day-trippers, and into the beach parking lot. I still had the coat and helmet on, and must look like either a supervillain or a crazy hobo. It sorta looked like a bulky motorcycle helmet, and I was getting covered in sand and dragging inappropriate luggage, so I was hoping hobo won out for anyone who saw me.
"Area cameras have been compromised," Pooja said. "Vehicle compromised."
A high-tech looking luxury car started in the parking space next to me. I opened the trunk and frowned, then pointed at my sand-covered luggage and boots. A scan line of green ran down both, scraping them clean.
Luggage loaded in the trunk, I took off my coat and threw it onto the back seat, moved the front passenger seat all the way back and down, then collapsed into it.
I was asleep before the stolen self-driving car hit the freeway.
"All monitoring systems are under my control," Pooja said in my ear.
The trunk popped open. I threw my luggage in, slammed it shut, and got into the back seat—careful not to damage anything with my bulky armor. I checked how events were progressing on my AR display against the back of the front seats. Emergency services starting to arrive at all locations. Video of fire shooting out of windows at two locations, the third surrounded by police with drawn guns. Fires weren't spreading outside the lots. Good. No bystanders seemed to be in any immediate danger.
Not that no one had been killed. Three- no, four people dead so far. One of the attackers hadn't made it out of the civilian ID's house before it exploded. None had made it out of my secret lair.
Technically, Pooja had killed them, not me.
Good for her.
They'd come at us, armed, invading homes, and without warning or negotiation. Fuck 'em. I'd have done it myself. Ordered Pooja to do it, even if she wasn't ready and willing to kill to protect me—which she clearly was.
Was that dark? Did that make me or Pooja a bad person? Was she suddenly a rampaging AI with no morals?
Ha. Yeah, no. I didn't have three hours to construct a lecture to myself on the morality of self defense. A lecture I didn't need, and Pooja likely had hard-coded.
I had fucking Sun Tzu'd this shit ahead of time. I knew myself. I knew my enemy. I wasn't going down easy because I got stupid and avoided immediately escalating. They came into a killing field when I was cut off from retreat. They had guns and supertech. I had more guns and better supertech. I won.
Sure, I could and would lie to other people, but not myself. I knew this wasn't some DC universe influence driving me to villainy—some ghost of the past, much more classically-criminal me. I wasn't some self-sacrificing hero in any universe, and I'd had this internal debate before my current odd situation made it truly relevant. I'd mentally prepared and planned for self defense scenarios, even if this was the most dramatic actual event I'd been through.
I wasn't going to beat myself up over this. I'd done the right thing. My mind was clear. My thoughts fast, focused. It wasn't even all due to the smart drugs. I smoothed the snarl off my face with conscious effort, working the tightness out of my jaw, fists loose, flexing my fingers then cracking my knuckles with loud pops.
"Okay Pooja, here's how we're going to escape from L.A." I flicked through the screens on my AR glasses, constructing a plan both simple and effective.
It didn't primarily involve shooting Slade Wilson, but that was a strong target of opportunity.
The Marina del Rey harbor is the world's largest man-made harbor for yachts. Lex Luthor has the world's largest single-masted, sloop-rigged super yacht anchored there in a huge birth. The mast towered thirty stories high. He must have been paying absurd amounts of money for that.
As I strolled casually along the edge of the parking lot, towards the individually locked gates protecting the boats, I tapped my fingers across a railing, seeing in my glasses things that didn't exist. Records showed Lex doesn't use it more than once a year. And it likely had the best security of any boat in the Marina. The lock clicked in front of me and I swung it open like I belonged here.
Screw it. I closed the info windows with a flick of my finger. It's not like I wanted to steal the stupid thing anyway. Too much heat. My frown only disappeared after Pooja finished confusing my trail via the poorly secured harbor records and pulled out past the breakwaters into open ocean on our stolen luxury motor yacht.
Pooja had selected this boat by comparing how likely it was to be missed against its advantageous features. The sporty little multi-decker, twenty-meter, three cabin boat had a high-tech, fully electronic piloting system and an owner out of state.
Despite the weather, I was still wearing my suit with full trench coat over it. I wished I'd designed the power suit with internal temperature management system. Paper-thin liquid cooling panels could have kept me comfortable as I hid in the pilothouse and waited for the AC to kick in.
We turned south, and green constructs dipped into the water on one side out of sight of shore. A net of constructs covered the hull to warn of boarders. The built-in sonar and radar systems were linked to Pooja along with the security cameras, but her reaction times were bad with only satellite connections to her main servers. I loaded several more combat programs onto the power suit just in case.
It looked good so far. I'd made it to the Marina and out on a boat without facing any opposition. I'd figured Slade wouldn't think of either the Calculator or his agents escaping on a boat. And even if he did have some plans, they'd be third-tier and too slow to react with Pooja compromising the entire Marina's security systems.
All traffic in the area of the boat was monitored. Nothing larger than a minnow got close without Pooja's notice. Once out of sight of shore and other ships, the entire boat was quickly covered in spiky, glowing defensive constructs. With nothing productive to do, I took a nap in the captain's cabin.
So, of course, thirty minutes later anti-ship missiles came over the horizon. As I pulled on my gloves and helmet, I listened to Pooja's ongoing reports.
"Four contacts, bearing one-six-four. Likely ship-fired based on profile. Assuming observer drone at extreme altitude. Brace."
Flexible, rounded constructs covered my ears and I hunched down next to the bed, exosuit arms over my helmet and a water survival program loaded and ready to manually trigger. A spiderweb of construct lines filed out the door and ports, connection to systems all over the ship.
When Pooja started firing, I could feel the deafening staccato sound in my chest from the AAA constructs. The boat jerked sideways in the water from the massive barrage of fire. It seemed to go on forever. I watched a constructed virtual image of the huge, glowing, green guns mounted on the decks of the boat, things more fitting to a battleship and spitting out hard light pellets at an absurd rate.
"One missile down," Pooja said. "Boat structural integrity damaged from weapon mounts. Danger! Jamming detec-"
My fingers flicked through the HUD menus. Broadband jamming took out the satellite link. Nothing else currently available. Pooja was out of contact. I manually linked to the AAA gun constructs and loaded the targeting program on my suit.
The boat shook again as I fired, corrected, and fired again. Tracking was mostly automatic but I still needed to target select and manually fire. Couldn't trust this bodged-together system if, say, Wonder Woman's invisible jet suddenly appeared.
I glanced at the cosmic energy charge meter. Power systems were holding for now and it was charging relatively fast. There are stars out even during the day, after all. The Sun, plus others drowned out by its light. The cosmic converter systems worked on non-interacting mystical particles, so it wasn't quite like solar energy. But that didn't mean I could waste it derping around with high-cost munitions like this.
Two down. Now the missiles were juking, dipping and twitching to avoid my fire. This avoidance program hadn't started earlier, likely because Pooja had opened fire at extreme long range and it was timed. Things had gotten significantly more difficult.
I could smell my own sweat in the cold, air-conditioned captain's cabin. The bed dug into my back as I braced my armored feet into the floor. I spared a moment for the navigation system, considered for a long, long second, then turned it toward shore, directly away from the missiles but also away from my objective in San Diego Bay.
I resumed fire again in bursts. Three seconds out. No jamming possible on my side. Couldn't yet get electronic or thermal effects good enough for ECCM, flares, or chaff out of the constructs.
Two seconds out. Got the third.
One second out. Screw burst—I went fully automatic. The boat felt like it was shaking apart. Damage control readout was red, so I guess I was. I triggered the shielding and water survival programs as I continued to fire and a green glow surrounded me and my suitcase.
I was across the room, half-buried in a wall. There had been an explosion, loud, close. My hands shook as I went to review the sensor data.
The fourth missile had impacted on an ablative energy shell, but the explosion wasn't fully contained. Cameras showed scorch marks and scattered shrapnel on the front left quarter of the hull.
I had at least ten minutes to shore; even if I just wanted to run it up on the beach that was too far. Another wave of missiles was likely. Using the boat to travel was still more energy efficient than flying—and likely safer, too—so I dug constructs into the water, formed streamlined screws, and poured on the speed.
Second wave, right on time. This was a little much. Who had this sort of munitions? This was military stuff. I checked the readout Pooja had download to my suit. These missiles were usually mounted on Chinese destroyers.
Suitcase in hand, coat on, and still surrounded by a glowing green shell, I exited the cabin and hopped overboard.
I skipped against the waves once, twice, then sank like the world's least prepared wake-boarding enthusiast, my suitcase dragged behind me on a glowing green tether. I trusted the integrity of the construct tying me to the battered yacht while I switched back to my helmet readouts. Manual AAA systems back under my control, I continued to fire on the next four missiles.
Even the suit had learning systems embedded in its programming. Aim was improving. Two exploded in flares of fire, one after the other. I grit my teeth and override the targeting system, firing at too long at the last heading of the second missile. The third slammed into a shield. The boat shook. I hit the defense system override and the fourth missile hit the boat directly, just right of the pilothouse.
The upper deck of the yacht evaporated in a cloud of fire, spraying debris across the waves. Several systems on the boat went dark and I let the glowing green hard-light fade from everywhere but the tether on the bottom of the boat.
Lengthening the line, I sunk lower, extending tethered sensor pods as I went. No sonar, but some of the light spectrum was still good at this depth. When the forward momentum of the boat slowed, I fired up my own screw propeller constructs. As I pulled away from the boat, I maintained a connection to the remaining functional shipboard cameras through constructs strung inside the shattered hull.
And there we go. Back helicopter, no markings of any kind. Two gunmen leaning out the sides.
I was getting to the edge of my range, the tether back to the ship getting a little thin by the time they reached the slowly sinking boat. They immediately opened fire on it with automatic weapons. Feature analysis popped up. Guns were also Chinese military make. Likely stolen. Good enough for me.
Time to play dead now and silently fade. Oh no, you got me. I am finished.
Yeah, fuck that, and fuck them.
I blew the boat apart, firing short-lived lances of green hard-light the size of telephone poles from the hull several hundred meters outward in all directions. It just so happened that the only two non-illusory, actually hard hard-light poles ran straight into the hovering helicopter, blowing apart the motor systems and crew compartment. The largest parts that fell into the ocean met just-constructed underwater mines that exploded into glowing balls of long, sharp spikes, further shredding the wreck, any survivors, and throwing plumes of water high into the air.
It took me down to 20% charge remaining. Worth it.
Short of pissing on their smoking corpses, I think I was just about as done as I could be here. First part of my message sent to whatever asshats thought that was a good idea. My guess was they were from some Chinese, Lex Luthor wannabe. Well now, whether they knew it or not, they were on my list. A list kept and executed by an AI that never slept, curated by a man completely out of fucks to give.
I held at five meters off the seabed, still covered in a construct shell and moving at forty knots from construct force pressure alone—about as fast and as silent as a modern attack sub, and twice as pissed-off.
As I dragged my luggage onto a lonely, rocky shore, Pooja's satellite connection came back up. I was suddenly bristling with outward-facing weapons and sensor pods. I stood absolutely still.
A second later, they retracted and the glow surrounding me faded.
"Good," Pooja said. "I see you are safe. I tracked your initial evasion via satellite observation but it is good to be able to make sure of it directly. Well done with the helicopter."
"Thanks." I blew out a breath and twisted at the waist, servos flexing and black gloved hands on my hips. The crink in my back popped satisfyingly.
"So, Pooja. You hacked a military spy satellite in mere minutes, just for this?"
"No," Pooja replied simply.
"Huh. Okay."
No longer glowing, I dragged my rolling suitcase through the sand, past some idle day-trippers, and into the beach parking lot. I still had the coat and helmet on, and must look like either a supervillain or a crazy hobo. It sorta looked like a bulky motorcycle helmet, and I was getting covered in sand and dragging inappropriate luggage, so I was hoping hobo won out for anyone who saw me.
"Area cameras have been compromised," Pooja said. "Vehicle compromised."
A high-tech looking luxury car started in the parking space next to me. I opened the trunk and frowned, then pointed at my sand-covered luggage and boots. A scan line of green ran down both, scraping them clean.
Luggage loaded in the trunk, I took off my coat and threw it onto the back seat, moved the front passenger seat all the way back and down, then collapsed into it.
I was asleep before the stolen self-driving car hit the freeway.
Last edited: