“Chase, I have to admit something. I like you. What you’ve done…that’s really pretty awesome. Joining this society, so different from ours, even going through that procedure to become one of them. You should have been an anthropologist. Maybe I should do that too.”
“It is different from working in a T-shirt shack on the beach,” Chase admitted. “I don’t know if my dad and mom would be proud of their son, or not. Dad wanted me to join the business full time, as a partner. I don’t know…I just couldn’t see it. I always wanted to make my own way. Actually, I kind of liked making music with the Croc Boys…being a musician and jamming on my go-tone kind of appealed to me. Then came the Farpool. That changed everything.”
Holland found Chase’s way of thinking appealing…just follow your dreams…if you want something, go for it. But there was still Hannah and Timmy…and the divorce. Sometimes, when you followed your dreams, you ran into a brick wall.
“Come on…let’s go hunt down a kip’t. The trip back will take several days. We’ll need provisions, too. Manklu’s an old kip’t driver…he’ll know where we can find one.”
Chase helped Holland light off her propulsors and they jetted about the still-recovering Keenomsh’pont for awhile, until Chase scared up a sled. It was a long-range model, too, plenty of room for two and all the supplies they would need.
“I really need to let the Metah know where we’re going,” Chase told her. They located the Metah’s pavilion in the center of the Omtorish camp, hard by an intricate terrace of rust-colored coral beds that surrounded the canopied platform like fingers of a hand, but Mokleeoh wasn’t there.
“Affectionate Metah is on vish’tu, attending to the kelke,” the vizier Oncolenia told them.
Chase introduced Josey Holland. “She’s a scientist, like Likteek. She’s also with UNISEA.”
Oncolenia didn’t bother to hide her disgust. “She’s Tailless. That’s all I need to know.”
Chase had come to expect such treatment from gruff old Oncolenia. To Holland: “Don’t bother with this one…she’s like somebody’s crotchety old grandmother. A real fussbudget. Please inform Affectionate Metah that Kel’metah is also on vish’tu, roaming back to Woods Hole. I’m taking Dr. Holland home.”
Chase started to scoot off but Oncolenia sniffed indignantly. “Are you forgetting something, eekoti Chase?”
“Huh? Oh, yes---pardon—” He came up to Oncolenia’s wrinkled gray face and nuzzled her right in the beak, nose to nose.
Holland choked back a chuckle. Her cocker spaniel Prissy did the same thing.
Chase departed, explaining, “Seomish custom. They have a phrase here…it explains a lot about how the Seomish live. It’s Kee’shoo and Ke’lee. Means love and life. Let’s go load up.”
“A rather unique kind of bonding ritual,” Holland theorized. “Fascinating.”
A few hours later, the kip’t bearing Chase and Dr. Josey Holland lifted away from the landing pads alongside the seamount and headed toward the surface.
For a few moments, Holland stared out of the cockpit at the intricate pattern of the settlement dwindling below them, festooned with garlands of lights and growing like a bacterial colony along the slopes of the guyot.
It won’t be long before they cover the entire mountain side, she told herself. They’re industrious, resourceful and determined. We’ve just got to find a way to live with these people and not be afraid of them. Study them, work with them, partner with them. We always destroy those who are different, those we can’t understand.
She tried out in her mind several opening phrases for an upcoming paper, a paper that if all went well would fall like a bombshell on the marine biology community. Who knew, maybe there could be a prize or two in it as well. She was anxious to get back to the Lab and get started. And she did have plenty of vid footage from this trip to help her out.
“I’m taking us up to the surface,” Chase informed Holland. “I want to see what happened to that sub. But we’ll have to be careful…the repeaters say there’s a lot of traffic up here.”
They breached carefully, in rolling waves, in a bright sunny day and found themselves in the midst of a small fleet. Ships of all sizes rode at anchor all around them. Many of them surrounded a patch of sea that seemed empty until Chase drove them a bit closer. Then they saw the submarine, attached by cable and tow line to one ship. The sub rode so low in the water they could barely see her topside hull and sail. Sailors and crewmen handled more ropes, cable and line fore and aft of the sail.
“Looks like they’re getting ready to tow her. I hope the crew’s okay. What’s that writing or name on the side of the tow ship?”
Holland squinted through the cockpit. She’d removed her helmet when Chase pumped real breathable air into the kip’t and was grateful beyond words for the smell of real air.
“It’s not English…looks Cyrillic…maybe Russian….Vor…Vorkuta, maybe.”
Chase hmmm’ed. “Russian, huh. Figures. The Ponkti and the scum who attacked her down below didn’t know they were dealing with a Russian sub.”
“That can’t be good,” Holland agreed. “At UNISEA, the Russian delegates are usually the most vociferous, always wanting to obliterate these new camps and villages, the ones in their waters. They’re touchy about them…claim they’re just spying for America.”
“Russians and Ponkti,” Chase just shook his head. “What a combination…they deserve each other.”
“Let’s go home,” Holland said. “I don’t like being around these creeps any more than necessary.”
“Your wish is my command,” Chase said.
He drove the kip’t smartly below the waves, studied the sonic display on his board for a few moments and then set course for the west. Little Harbor, Oyster Pond and the Woods Hole campus were a good two-day cruise away.
Twelve thousand miles to their east, Admiral Hu Zhejiang studied his Russian colleague carefully. Morskoi Flot Admiral Anatoly Melekhin reminded Hu of a spicy onion from some of his wife’s Szechuan dishes: bruised, white, crumbly and flaky with many layers concealing a bitter core inside. Melekhin indicated a 3-d map display gracing the table in the fourth-floor conference room of the Pacific Fleet headquarters building, a neo-Stalinist wedding-cake monstrosity alongside Vladivostok’s oily brown Zolotoy Rog.
“Then we are agreed, are we not?” Melekhin was saying. “The plan is set. Our fleet will furnish four submarines and two destroyers, with one missile cruiser and an assault force of five thousand morskaya pekhota…naval infantry. Frontal Aviation out of Khabarovsk will furnish air cover for the operation…the Fiftieth Air Regiment, to be precise.”
“Agreed,” said Hu. “The PLA Navy will furnish four submarines…Qin-class. They will be accompanied by two destroyers, two cruisers, a frigate and half a dozen fast-attack craft, corvette-style. Our own naval infantry will number two thousand.”
“Da. With this force, we’ll put a quick end to the American spy sea people infesting our waters. You’ve seen the latest intelligence…the fish are spreading like a virus…already, the settlement in the Sea of Okhotsk is moving day by day toward Kirovsky on Kamchatka. Fishing is disrupted…our shrimpers are afraid of them already, with their sound weapons and stunners…it won’t be long before they encircle Kamchatka completely. It’s a bold Western plot and Moscow won’t stand for it. My orders are specific: get rid of them and use whatever force is necessary.”
Hu was sympathetic. “We’ve had encounters with the fish people at Reed Banks, in the Nan Zhongguo Hai, the South China Sea. We’ve even had meetings with them. It’s like dealing with talking lobsters. You have a name for the operation selected?”
“I do,” said Melekhin. “Operation Bich.”
Hu smiled. He knew a smattering of Russian from previous exercises and dealings with Meehan’s colleagues. “Operation Scourge. Very appropriate for removing an infestation from our waters.”
The two flag officers then concluded their negotiations and briefings with a toast.<
br />
Dr. Josey Holland Lifelogger Post:
I’m posting this while Chase and I are en route back to Woods Hole. I don’t know exactly where we are…I’m not real sure Chase does either; he seems to struggle and swear at the controls a lot…but we must be somewhere in the western North Atlantic. I’m sure we’ll get back to Woods Hole somehow.
My respect for Chase…and his Seomish friends…grows every day. My God, what they have been through…if even half of it’s really true, I can’t imagine what it must have been like. I like Chase, okay…maybe that’s not quite accurate. Maybe it’s a little more than ‘like.’ But he’s just a kid really. Barely out of his teens. He has an innocence I find touching and the kind of energy I can only dream of having…he claims to have come from Florida, working for his dad at a t-shirt shack on the beach and now look at him: he’s a kind of tribal chieftain for all the water clans of the Seomish refugees. And he’s a half-breed on top of that. They must have sensed the same thing I have: Chase is the real deal. Sincere, concerned, upright, kind of cute, even. He looks just like a blond surfer dude.
The research possibilities with the Seomish are mind-boggling: marine biology, anthropology, sociology, technology, ethics…the list goes on. If we don’t wind up killing these poor people first, we’ll be studying them, maybe even working with them to explore the oceans, for generations.
I don’t know…maybe it’s the contrast that intrigues me, attracts me. Moths are attracted to light and they die trying to figure it all out. Maybe that’ll happen to me too. Yeah, I’m bitter over what Stephen and his lawyer-leeches are trying to do, trying to take Timmy and Hannah away from me. It’s insane, it’s criminal. Talk about ethics…the lawyers have none. Hell, even the mollusks in the aquarium have a better sense of right and wrong.
Two things scare me and since I really can’t see much out of this sled cockpit, I’ve had to wallow in them for hours back here. First, we may lose the greatest chance we’ve had in a million years to get to know and learn from people really different from us, radically different…if we don’t destroy them first. Second, I may lose my son and daughter to a system that’s about as fair and impartial as the earthquake that almost destroyed the Seomish settlement at Muir seamount a few days ago.
Maybe I’m not so good a mother after all. With the Seomish and all the new possibilities…I just don’t know anymore. But I am mother to Timmy and Hannah. They wouldn’t be here without me, would they?
Okay, so I’ll admit to some real affection and maybe even a feeling of solidarity with the Seomish who’ve emigrated from a doomed world and what they have gone through. Nobody likes them, except for me, nobody wants them and the world is trying really hard to get rid of them.
Lawyers…and politicians uber alles. Maybe if we could get the Farpool back, we could send them somewhere, like right into a black hole.
I do know one thing…and it looks like Chase is getting stuff to eat out of his pods right now…that boy does like to eat…I’m resolving right here and now to do everything in my power to make sure the Seomish survive. That we don’t hound them and harass them and drive them to extinction like we have so often before with other species.
We have so much to learn from them, I’m sure of it. I have so much to learn. On this trip, Chase has been trying to explain what the Seomish are really like as people. There’s something called Ke’shoo and Ke’lee…love and life. Seomish philosophy. I want to learn all about that, how they live together, how they get along, how they resolve disputes, how they fight and make up.
Yeah, we really do have a lot to learn from them…an awful lot indeed.
Chapter 9
Solnet Omnivision Video Post
@anika.radovich.solnet worldview
August 5, 2115
2230 hours
SOLNET Special Report
“Bermuda Divers Witness Assault”
Anika Radovich interviews Anson Locke, CEO of Bermuda Marine Salvage, and Andrew Lynn, dive team crew chief, about what both men heard and witnessed several days ago…an apparent military assault on the camps of the Sea People near Bermuda…
“First of all, Mr. Locke, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to be with us today.”
Locke is sandy-haired, craggy-faced, weathered with too many years at sea. “Surely. Anything we can do to help.”
“Mr. Locke, you and your dive chief reported to the Bermuda Post several days ago that you had witnessed some kind of underwater military operation in the vicinity of the Sea Peoples’ base on or around July 1. Is that correct?”
“It is, ma’am. Andrew here and me were running a salvage operation about fifty kilometers east of Bermuda at that time. Freighter called Dominion Queen…Widberg Line, I believe. She went down two years ago and several insurance companies have contracted with us to recover some valuable parts, some industrial gear and some documents. That’s our job.”
“It’s been a pretty smooth operation, too,” Lynn added. Andrew Lynn is tall, gawky, with a long face and long curly blond hair. He has a noticeable scar along his chin. “Fairly deep so we use special dive gear. Over a thousand feet down, she is. It’s given us a chance to air out our new drones…the Mantas.”
Radovich is intrigued. “Your report mentioned the Mantas. This is something new, these drones?”
“Not totally,” says Lynn. “Just a new model. But they’re slicker than snot, pardon my French, ma’am. They dive deep, stay down forever, great range, more tools than a garage mechanic.”
“Sturdy too,” Locke adds. “They’re already making my job a lot easier.”
“Tell our viewers what you saw…and heard.”
Now, Locke runs a hand through thinning hair. “Well, we’re on a dive, see…fairly straight-forward. We’ve got two Mantas going and me and Andy here are down there with ‘em. We use the Mantas to go inside the freighter and see what’s what. It can be kind of dangerous in places like that.”
Lynn picks up the story. “We heard some explosions to our west…not too far away.”
“How many explosions?”
Locke looks over at Lynn. “I’d say…maybe four or five….”
“Something like that. Big ones, powerful blasts. We both figured that was odd. The maritime notices said nothing about construction work in the area. There aren’t any gas lines we know of…no reports of unexploded ordnance cooking off or anything like that.”
“What did you do then?”
“Well, we know these waters around Bermuda pretty well so we detached one of the Mantas to go investigate. She headed over and got some pretty good footage and audio…we have it here.”
Radovich turns to a nearby display. “Let’s have a look….”
Append Video Segment 227.2:
The UWAT troops rapidly and efficiently exit Felix One’s lockout chamber and light off their Diver Propulsion Units, whirring away from Launch Point in a blur of waves and bubbles. The Barracudas spread out into approach formation, line abreast, spaced ten meters apart, as they close on their target. The dive leader checks his sounder echoes and gets a solid lock on the first structures along the settlement’s perimeter. That would be their target, as soon as the remoras did their job. He settles onto a steady cruise speed of four knots, hugging the blocks and hills of volcanic tuff, sweeping around thatches of kelp and sea grass and arrowing through the farthest fields of hydrothermal smokers, their twisting columns of smoke corkscrewing toward the surface several hundred meters overhead.
As soon as UWAT 3 passes by the outer sounding fences, the Sea People act. Sound grenades are lobbed right into the middle of the force, detonating with a concussive BOOM! that deafens all the divers. Immediately, their attack formation discipline is disrupted as ear drums are burst, equipment shattered and valves and seals loosened. An explosion of bubbles with arms and legs flying soon envelopes the area.
Then the Sea People let fly with a barrage of blinders. The explosion of light sears eyeballs, disrupts instruments and destroys wha
tever is left of formation tactical discipline. The stricken divers of UWAT 3 are scattered, slammed and barrel-rolled into a chaotic jumble of thrashing and flailing bodies.
Then, the Sea People attackers honk out a command for a swarming and enveloping response and they charge into the middle of the melee, prods sizzling with rapid-fire discharge while the divers fight back with their Eel prods, fists, knives, spear guns, anything they could use. Close-quarters combat underwater was all about position and leverage and the combat divers of UWAT 3, well trained and ruthless though they were, are no match for the swimming and lunging ability of well-armed defenders. Surrounded and outgunned, the divers are hopelessly overmatched by scores of defenders, well-equipped with stunners, blinders, prods and toxic scentbulbs, all of which steadily overwhelm the resistance of the humans.
When a pair of seamother calves appear from out of the murk, honking and bellowing and thirsty with the scent of blood, the Sea People withdraw and let the beasts finish off the attackers.
It isn’t pretty and the waters are soon choked with blood and viscera and entrails.
End Video Segment 227.2
Anika Radovich swallows hard at the scene of carnage, dim and hard to distinguish in the murk at several hundred feet down but the clouds of blood and body parts can’t be ignored.
“Mr. Locke…Mr. Lynn, what in your opinion are we watching here?”
Locke shuts off the vid footage, which is about to loop and display again. Nobody wants to see the blood and body parts again.
“Well, we ID’ed the divers as Navy UWAT…Underwater Assault Teams. I’ve known a few in my time and they’re pretty courageous souls, most of them. This was some kind of military operation, I guess.”
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