Broken Isle

by Pascal in Quebec

ELF! Damaged! Sociopath! Lucas - magic & psionics - Season 1, after Shraeder; the fallout of the inquiries while above the Tonga Trench lead to Lucas plus many others to get set adrift on the ocean during a storm. They discover an isolated peninsula split between an orphanage, a prison, and sanatorium that were run by a british occult sect plus US navy base abandoned after WW II.

1. Chapter 1

The author wishes to express thanks to anyone who may read his story and encourages them to leave reviews, comments or even flame it hard. As with any who try their hand at publicly expressing an idea or story concept, all feedback is important and welcome.

Disclaimer: I do not own SeaQuest, Star Wars, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators or broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

SeaQuest

ABSTRACT

This story takes place in season 1, just after the SeaQuest was violently boarded and taken over by Colonel Shraeder and his mercenaries. I will be modifying several elements of that episode to fit with the fic, notably that there were more mercs in the transport, they were more violent and Lucas had been significantly more reactive and aggressive when helping to safeguard the ship and crew. The modifications to the canon of many episodes will be major and showed as such, in flashbacks or during discussion between crew members.

IMPORTANT: for the purpose of keeping this story logical and relevant, the episode "Nothing but the truth" where Shraeder invades the ship is set as #2 in the season instead of playing at #14 as original. I then follow it immediately by the "Treasures of the Tonga Trench" as #3 instead of playing #5 in the season since I need the inspection to happen quicker to set up stuff quickly and again, logically in time and space. The episode "Bad water" where Lucas, Ford, Krieg and Westphalen are adrift in a life-raft is moved to #4 and then the rest goes weird from there...

This story is Alternate Universe, several characters are OOC and there are several crossovers with many of the maritime-inspired themes and mythos. Like my other story "Justice for Lucas" this has a lot of psionics, magicks et al as such things were part & parcel of the SeaQuest canon in all three seasons. There won't be any temporal mechanics & bypasses in this story.

PS; I like flames, they're fun to read so don't hesitate to write them.

WARNING; the language level of this one is a bit trashy when we consider a story based on boats and sailors. However, as I always warn people who read my work: this language was pretty much normal in the school yard 30 years ago when I was a teenager. So, how can you have such a thin skin and be part of the same culture on the same continent if this is really that offensive to you? Where did you spend the last few decades, if you can't take a few hard words from the mouths of kids when these words have been around since before World War I?

BROKEN ISLE

FIRST CHAPTER; NEVER LET THE MILITARY DECIDE ANYTHING

The hidden BEAST within

(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 06:48am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, submersible workshop B, shuttle silo 3

North of the Australian coastline

Lucas was slowly walking around his most recent (secret) cybernetic master piece, touring the four feet wide and 12 feet long, segmented metal and plastic frame. He was checking the joints, wires and runes as he mused silently on the vast amounts of bloodletting that his precious widdle baby girl was going to let flow when she activated. He was so proud of all her many clawed limbs, laser lenses and life-force absorption glyphs that he could have wept in joy if the tears hadn't been drugged, whipped and raped out of him long ago by his own family. He needed to remember to create something extra special for them to thank them for making him into such a cold dead hunk of rock.

Pulling on an armored wire to test the reliability of the fittings and the tensile strength of the actual wire at the same time, the teenager let his mind wander along whatever stream of consciousness it was wont of contemplating. His body was well capable of managing on its own for a few minutes without active input. One of the many abnormalities and side-effects of the way he was 'conceived' and then 'born'. Guess they don't make private high-class fertility and genetics engineering clinics like they used to in the 1500's… Oh well, Cynthia and Lawrence had wanted a designer baby that was calm and pliable so he would be low-maintenance and not prone to making trouble or attracting attention away from them.

Boy, did they get what they wanted…

Pair of worthless, meaningless, ill-aborted lower-than-squib rejects from a cesspit…

Lucas was the one paying daily the mortgage of pain and depravity that their idiocy combined to the limited competency of the medics wrought into existence. His life was miserable and he had just enough emotions to be aware of how much pain and suffering he was experiencing. Most of the time. On slow days, his lowest threshold of emotional understanding was still too high to realize that he was being shamed or humiliated by the people around him as he didn't care for them, their existences or anything about them at all, especially not their opinions.

-Thoughts & musings-

Lucas was born emotionally deadened due to the plethora of potions and mundane drugs inside both parents when they conceived him. Lucas was an aberration in the eyes of Nature, Magic and Science with all three reminding him daily about how much a mistake his awakening had been.

Cynthia Holt was a lawyer that valorized emotional control and self-discipline above all else. She was doubtlessly the coldest, most emotionally detached woman you would ever meet that was still sane and socially functional despite her state. Lawrence Wolenczak was a multi-genius technologist who was mule-headed and mean-tempered. He was a rabidly violent, self-centered and self-absorbed bastard who thought the World existed to cater his every whim and depravity. And he was quite whimsical and particularly depraved for a man of his young age.

Both of them however shared a medical situation that set them apart from their large families and numerous relatives thus making the plan to isolate and abuse Lucas as instinctive as breathing. The two families were long lines of magically skilled Jews from Eastern Europe, in Hungary. The usual family member was normally a semi-user or full-user of magick with an oddball psionicist thrown in at Nature's whim. Even those who, from the 1700's onwards, dabbled in technology and science tended to couple such with runes and power crystals or at least potions to fuel and maintain the wondrous devices they created.

After almost 700 years uninterrupted of birthing magically capable and very intelligent people, the bloodlines of Holt and Wolenczak happened to give birth in the same generation to their first squibs: people with just enough internal magic to see and perceive the mystical but not enough to actually perform the wanded spells or enact transmutations. Those squibs were Cynthia and Lawrence.

The two families were suitably appalled at the state of their children but they had other kids in that generation from those same parents who had magic available inside of them. Also, none had been born first so the heredity of neither bloodline was challenged. Cynthia was born third child and second daughter whilst Lawrence was born fourth child and third son. This meant that neither family was pressured to keep on having children to create a viable magically capable heir to hold the family wards in effect over the houses and businesses.

Both families were very old noble blood and had several distant relations with the Imperial House of Hapsburg amongst their sixth and seventh degree cousins as well as several far ancestors, also six or seven generations in the past. When the two families moved the principal holdings, finances and population to the USA just on the cusp of the Great War in 1904, they quickly established new trades and workshops, fitting in well not only with the large Jewish population of New York state but also the others all around.

This meant that Cynthia and Lawrence were both born in rich, well established and well known families that were able to easily support them and their endeavors as they grew older and chose their careers. With so many connections, getting into Cambridge University was easy. With the incredible advances made by mundane technology and science, especially electronics and medicine, there was no longer a fear of being poor or sick if you were born a squib as there were now even more options than available to the magical population.

Despite all this, Cynthia and Lawrence grew up cold, detached, removing themselves from family gatherings or decision councils and then blamed the relatives for not listening to them or isolating them when it was their own doing. Their self-centeredness knew no bounds and, recognizing a similar outlook and disposition in each other, they began to socialize more and eventually decided that they should unite their forces against the assemblage of mystically diseased curs that were their relatives.

They married in a rather nice ceremony attended by the majority of both families and several dozen friends or business partners that they had already gathered during their studies and internships. When the wedding night arrived, they put in effect their 'Master Plan'; they both took magical potions that would work together to unite their two biologies into a formidable being of high intellect and potent magical abilities while making said child quiet, pliable, obedient and essentially a tool for them to use.

Their plan backfired spectacularly against them.

The potions worked half-way before interacting in a way they shouldn't have as each was designed to be used alone specifically to avoid contamination and crossed effects turning poisonous for the host. The embryo had all the genetic markers for strong magical affinities across all the basal realms of Channeling, Essence and Mentalism but also above that into Primal Essaence and Psionics. The child could possibly be one of the few who are born with the capacities to become arch-mage from the beginning of life, a rarity and great boon to any household.

Unfortunately, Cynthia and Lawrence were severely countered in their plan. The embryo was female, not the Primus Filii Heir (first born child & first son) they wanted. Secondly, the medics detected vestigial genetic markers of an unidentifiable magical creature in the baby's DNA from a point far back in the Family's past when one of their male ancestors coupled with an entity to enter more magical capacity into the Bloodline. The two parents decided that Cynthia would begin a mixed regimen of magical elixirs and mundane drugs to correct the embryo's gender and also remove all 'creature' vestiges from the Bloodline to keep the child biologically a pure human.

It was a catastrophic failure.

The ingredients in the many liquids that Cynthia either swallowed or received by dialysis were not meant to interact together. The result was a baby boy but whose magical core was not developing as per the expectations of the parents or their various doctors and apothecaries.

Lucas Edward Daniel Yitzhak Holt Wolenczak was born with the magical aura and potential of a Hedge Witch or just a level above squib, so not enough to be accounted even as a semi-user of magic. Even worse, he was still attuned to all basal realms, Primal Essaence and Psionics but had also added extra affinities to the remaining inferior realms of Electricity, Life-Force and Radiation. His magical core was multi-parted like an arch-mage but unstable and leaking heavily into his body, mind and soul thus contaminating and damaging them. The medics had no choice at that point; to keep the child alive, they drained his magical core and placed Binds on it to force it to heal the tears and solidify enough to be released so it could grow. It didn't. After three months, the baby's core had sclerotized and stopped growing while the tears had reduced but not completely closed.

The innocent baby boy's magical potential was now reduced even lower to that of a squib barely able to perceive scrolls, potions and magical creatures around him. His damaged core still had the chance to heal if the boy received careful attention during his life. He could end up having some degree of active externalized magic around the ages of 18 to 21 years, after the normal magical maturity and therefore develop as a late bloomer which was a known condition that could be helped easily.

The real problems however were yet to be discovered elsewhere than the toddler's magical core. He was sickly as his body had been poisoned at the cellular level by Heavy Magick; liquefied Mythal. That meant that the many energies swimming wildly around his body had merged into the higher power realm of Mythal as they normally do during a conclave or ritual but the energy had then condensed until it became liquid and circulated around his blood and lymph, attacking, damaging and mutating him at a fundamental level.

The medics were obliged to commit even more invasive, more destructive procedures to remove the unnatural Heavy Magick from his body and then transfuse directly by dialysis a series of potions to stabilize his DNA and physical form. It was at that point that it was discovered that the vestigial DNA from the unknown creature had not been removed completely as it was now making an absurdly aggressive comeback.

Cynthia was beyond all anger and disappointment. She began suffering a nasty case of post-partum depression that slowly but certainly turned to detachment from her child and then full-out scorn by the time he was three years old. She abandoned Lucas to his father's violent rages when he was four and divorced Lawrence when he was 7, calling an end to what she dubbed "A failed experiment resulting from the failed fool that supplied inadequate, dysfunctional DNA material and cheap potions from unlicensed quacks." She divested herself of all fault or responsibility, even though she had been a willing participant and had actually found the medical clinics and specialists through her connections at her law firm.

Lawrence was disappointed the first six months the child was alive and then fell into a deep pit of anger and contempt at the boy's diseased, defective body and core, while he also felt a great deal of jealousy and vindictive rage against his having a greater magical potential than both parents put together. His birth and existence was like a slap in the face to the squib. It was like Nature and the Family were saying "You see this? It was you who was defective at birth, not him. You were inferior, you were wrong, not the Bloodline, not the Family and not Nature. YOU."

He could not endure this. This defective, diseased insult could not and would not become his official legal Heir if he could avoid it. He tried every legal maneuver he could, exploiting Cynthia for this while she was still his wife. The situation was untenable to both: the Family charters had clear clauses about Primus Filii and disownment; they could not remove the boy, give him to adoption or abandon him to an orphanage without losing all of their own station, legal status and monetary advantages inside the Families. The two adults were stuck with a defective, sickly, unresponsive lump of flesh that they could not rid themselves of as both Law and Magic accounted them as responsible for his existence. Wanted or not, he was the Heir of both of them and that could not be changed.

The only benefit they had and would exploit to death was that as parents to a magical offspring they were given greater allowances from the Families to care for his health as well as better opportunities to trade and study with the magical members of the Houses. People outside the Families who had ignored or shunned them outright became friendly as they now had influence over a child of great potential. Even if Lucas never amounted to much of anything in terms of active magic, the strength and shape of his core guaranteed his children would be magical. He could couple with a squib, or even a mundane, and the procreates would be at least semi-users of magick. As such, the two parents saw the innocent baby boy the way a rancher sees a bull; which cow do you couple it with to obtain the best new generation of cattle.

The real problems became apparent when he started learning languages by the age of 13 months and could speak English and Hebrew fluently at the age of 2 years. His mind really was the multi-genius that the parents had wanted but it was functioning weirdly. The child had very few emotional reactions and rarely displayed them outwardly. It was only because of the mind healers and psionicists at the hospital that they could guarantee that he was mentally sound and stable, just very quiet and shy.

The two parents thought that at least one small part of the plan had gone right when the doctors and apothecaries dumped more on them. When he was three years old, they did tests on the toddler to evaluate his emotional range and mental responses to situations. He could already speak, read and write five languages, had begun basic math and some arithmancy and seemed to have an affinity with multi-dimensional tasks as evidenced by the massive LEGO structures that littered his room at home.

The diagnostics came back and put paid on the plans of Cynthia and Lawrence to use the boy as a ticket to greater fame and glory. It set off the violence intrinsic to the man's temper while the woman pulled back and let the toddler face the adult male's rage alone and defenseless.

Lucas had been tested biologically and was deemed to be sterile; he would never have children on his own unless he used a hospital and biochemistry lab to help the process. Naturally speaking, he would never be able to produce sperm as the developing testicles were mutated and damaged beyond repair. His lungs were a bit smaller than they should be. His liver and kidneys had weird structures in them the doctors could not identify but that actually made the organs more efficient and gave the boy a level of immunity to disease and toxins that most would envy. His teeth were not completely square like humans but healthy. He did have a few weird glands in his tongue that allowed him to taste more and better than humans. His eyes were completely different but inside the orbs; nothing showed visibly. The boy had the capacity to see an enlarged spectrum of color, had infra-vision, thermal-sight and would soon develop mage-sight naturally as all the precursor signals were there.

Psychologically, it was worse. The many potions that Lucas had endured to make him male, magical and also pliable and silent had all interacted badly and damaged his brain physiology at the critical moment of fetal formation. Later, the energetic residues and further potions to heal his torn magical core had attacked and mutated his mind and soul. The boy was evaluated as being clinically depressed, chronically shy and showed the first symptoms of both oppositional-defiant syndrome and sociopathy at advanced degrees never seen in toddlers his age before. The child was incapable of emotional responses greater than curiosity, boredom, rejection and fear. The mind healers knew that the child could also experience pain, anger and perhaps eventually some affection or love, but that would take psychotherapy, psionic surgeries and a heavy potions regimen between the ages of 14 and 17 at the earliest. Even then, the results would be iffy and nobody could guarantee anything.

The two parents were enraged and dumbfounded at the same time. The child was sick and defective to the point it was questionable if he was actually human, let alone functionnal autonomously but at the same time he managed to end up with more magical potential and better health prospects than everybody else in the two Families combined! What damned creature from Tarterus was this?

After that fateful hospital visit at the age of 3, Lucas was never taken to a doctor again. He would need to run away or call for help himself to receive any kind of medical support. His father began beating him regularly until at the age of 4 when the small sickly child had a dramatic episode of accidental magic that threw Lawrence through the wall of the house, down three levels to hit the pavement in the driveway in a heap of broken limbs and crushed organs. Neither would ever be the same again. Cynthia made miracles of lawlessness as she made the reports disappear, got Lawrence into a private very secretive clinic and dumped her injured son in the arms of the first of many nannies that would never really care or give a damn passed the weekly check they got for doing the job.

-End of Thoughts & musings-

Lucas brought his attention back to the mechanical nightmare in front of him and noticed that he had experienced another small bout of dissociation. He tended to remove himself from the material world and retreat into his mind to idly bask in the thoughts and facts that flowed there. He was at peace inside of his mind. He was even better inside of his fully formed mindscape, deep inside his Mind Palace, but he had work to do and could not afford to take the ten or twelve hours that a good, calming session of mind-swimming would need to be effective.

The imbeciles at New Cape Quest had tried to stop sitting on their hands and came up with an idiocy of such momentous incompetence that it would force the court martial and the governments that had membership in the UEO Alliance to rewrite the charts and laws concerning dereliction of duty, misuse of equipments and men, endangering the National Security of the members states, and so on…

The spectacle would last for years to come and be quite amusing for Lucas. It might even provide him with an opportunity to screw with the bastards who had imprisoned him aboard this floating coffin.

Checking that he had the proprietary remote control for his precious little horror stored in his messenger bag, the 16 year old locked the submersible workshop from the inside and then passed the airlock towards the interior of deck-C, towards the aft of the ship. He moved silently and carefully while monitoring the movements of the few crew left aboard on his heavily modified PAL device to make certain nobody took advantage of the empty ship to try and ambush him for unsavory purposes. He had to injure and maim several people in the three months he'd been aboard to get them to back off and stop trying to beat him or use his body as a fuck toy. Wouldn't do to get caught now with nothing but locked bulkheads and empty air to give assistance if he screamed out for help.

Not that anybody would help if the boat was chock full of humans anyways… His bitter personal experience engraved in scars all over his body showed that for all to see.

After ten minutes of skulking in the shadows, the teenager arrived at an anonymous maintenance closet where he entered and closed the door tightly. Going to the back, he moved silently the wheeled bucket and mops to access the rear wall. Taking out an Allen-key from the cuff of his flannel shirt, he slotted the metal rod in the small hole right under one of the three shelves and swung the hidden door towards him. He quickly stepped through the construction / maintenance doorway and disappeared into the maze of cramped tunnels that criss-crossed the ship's structure to allow power and network wires, pipes and ventilation ducts to reach all sectors and compartments. It was his best, most secure way of moving unhindered and without attacks.

Just three minutes in the tunnel saw him open another hidden steel plate and emerge into the bottom of the damned pit where the crew had put him to live. The Shitpit. An out-of-the-way chamber that was actually just a maintenance post to control the life support and sensors inside the Aqua-Tubes for the entire ship. The room had pipes of liquid ammonia and high voltage wires feeding into the sector breaker box right next to his lumpy, worn out mattress and ratty sheets. The place had NEVER been designed for human life to be established here as an apartment but the crew, especially Ford, had wanted him out of sight and out of their lives ASAP. This was the solution. He could live here or be lodged permanently in the brig, under guard and let out only when the cybernetics acted out.

They would pay for this.

And their current set of orders coming from no less than the chief minion himself, William Allard Boyd Noyce, would open the door by which he would walk out to freedom with his head held high in full view of everybody.

Let the bloodsport begin.

The Test Plan didn't predict this

(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 7:30am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, Bridge

North of the Australian coastline

Commander Jonathan Ford couldn't keep the lump of cold lead at the pit of his stomach from seeming even heavier as he listened to his superior officer, shown on the large main viewscreen up front, outline the last elements of the hull siphon tests to be carried out in less than an hour. Firstly, the things were just the newest version of an old invention created by the greek philosopher, mathematician and all around genius: Archimedes; the bilge pump.

Now, the old mechanical pumps had to be triggered manually and their power supply determined just how effective they could be. Inside of a submersible that was under the waves, that meant not a whole lot. Old diesel engines made exhaust vapors that were toxic and batteries would not last long enough to keep the ship afloat to reach land unless your were hugging the coastline already. Bridger's invention was revolutionary in the sense that he had integrated a HTP peroxide fuel-cell controlled by a small simplistic computer circuit equal to a pocket calculator. This was russian technology from the 1960's given a new twist to make it smaller and friendlier. Liquid HTP was safe and reliable and the miniature fuel-cell system was both airtight and uninflammable so the peroxide reaction inside was completely shielded and would not react to, or be affected by, the external situation of the ship.

Nonetheless, Ford was uneasy. He was relieved to see that Bridger, Hitchcock and Crocker had similar qualms and he wasn't hallucinating dangers out of empty air. For the first time that Jonathan Ford ever saw, somebody was saying out loud that Admiral Noyce's plan to test the siphons using the SeaQuest was a pile of cockamamie crap. Bridger had lodged formal protests, written out complaints and called up to the chain of command as high as he could without damaging himself or his staff. It didn't go anywhere near as high as he used to be able to reach. The captain had been reduced to write down and log his complaints with the NCIS and GAO people assigned floating posts aboard the G.W.H. Bush carrier group and hope that nothing went bad.

Now when exactly was it that prayers were actually granted the last time?

Even with the mighty and numerous ships of the Bush group patrolling some 4,000 feet above their heads, it was a long ways down and took lots of equipment, men and effort to reach the SQ if anything should happen. Not the most comforting thought.

The tall black man took off his day cap and passed a weary hand over his bald scalp, rubbing the skin to help the blood circulation as he hoped to avoid a stress-induced migraine. He wasn't prone to them unlike Bridger or Westphalen but when he got one, it could lay him out for two days straight. Better to not suffer that ailment at this moment.

After getting the last minute details, he and Kathy were about to sign off and begin checking across all decks the readiness of the few people left when an emergency beacon was activated about ten kilometers of the ship's left side. Something motorized was moving inside the military exclusion zone and nobody had detected them yet? How in the Hells was that possible?

Ford felt a cold wave of dread slide down his spine as he listened to the orders coming from admiral Noyce as he overrode Captain Bridger's good sense. Bridger and the carrier Bush's commanding officer wanted that un-vetted shuttle to either rise to the surface or wait at fixed depth and stop moving until assistance vehicles from the carrier could reach them for recovery. Admiral Noyce ran roughshod over them both and ordered that the damaged shuttle be brought aboard SeaQuest for the flimsiest of motives: cash. He wanted to be able to bill the shuttle's owners for the rescue, parking, parts and labor so as to boost the ship's budget. So he told publicly. Jonathan doubted the ship would see more than a handful of credits on all of that.

Given the danger level and the uncertainties, both Captain Bridger and Admiral Donato who had charge of the Bush group speed-typed their misgivings and opposition to the new orders while at the same time telling Ford to get people into the parking silo hub to receive the newcomers and lend assistance.

The two senior officers were barely finished sending their letters of grievances that the shooting had begun as the control hub's access hatch opened and let in mercenaries equipped with dart guns to put to sleep anybody they saw.

War had come to SeaQuest and now they were in the midst of trench warfare right inside their own corridors. How the Hells were they supposed to win this with just fourteen people aboard, two of them medics and another being the smarmy, rebellious little kid nobody wanted here. They were so screwed it wasn't even funny!

Madness in the halls

(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 07:22am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat

North of the Australian coastline

Lucas sat alone, silently with the lights turned off, in conference room 3 of Deck-A just 50 feet behind the bridge's clamshell doors as he had been ordered to do by Ford. He was listening distractedly to the chatter squawking out of the ceiling loudspeakers, the ongoing conversation between the SeaQuest's bridge crew and Captain Bridger who was presently located in the Operations Room of the G.H.W. Bush aircraft carrier sailing roughly 4,000 feet above their heads with its entire combat group.

This Bill Noyce inspired mess was a clusterfuck in progress and it was quickly devolving into a masterful level of FUBAR-ness that only a drunken bum of a sailor on the last huzza of his botched career could invent. There weren't no ways it would end up going well for his poor creamy-white hide, not if his personal history was the measuring stick by which the situation was compared.

They had the biggest submarine WARSHIP built by humanity to date, carrying 12 Synthium tipped ICBM's and 4 mark 11 nuclear torpedoes in the forward tactical bay and what were they doing with it all? Playing at who could hold his breath the longest before turning blue in the face. Morons, the lot of them. It could only come from Admiral William Allard Boyd Noyce, that idiotic idea to use a fully commissioned, fully armed and enabled nuclear boomer to test out the new versions of the hull siphons that Nathan Bridger had designed.

Evacuate the ship, delay projects, put off critical research, kick out Darwin and relocate 221 of the 235 crew off-boat to test what was in fact just a souped-up newer version of bilge pumps. Could they have used an old Aegis destroyer or Arleigh-Burke hull to do this? Yes, they could have. But Noyce came up with the argument that it would be more striking and more visually poignant for the Pentagon paper pushers if it was done with Nathan's own boat. The new design was more susceptible of quick acceptance and faster inclusion in new ship designs if it was done spectacularly this way. Lucas wasn't convinced in the least and Bridger had the good sense to not be convinced either.

This whole mess stunk of another of Noyce's get-rich-quick schemes, like the very one that had Lucas parking his pasty complexion on the hand brakes aboard the biggest, baddest, most ill-conceived teenager-sitting service the UEO Navy could float. Introculi that fat slovenly cad was, and even Nathan Hale-the-almighty-hero Bridger couldn't deny that anymore. Not that he had ever tried all that hard anyways. For an old washed-out drunken wastrel of a beach bum, the man had maintained a startlingly impressive level of clear-headedness and objective reasoning. When he was sober, that is.

The adolescent closed his flint blue eyes and passed a weary hand through his long wheat-blond hair, messing it even more than usual. The orders Bridger was giving to Ford and Hitchcock were some of the most retarded he had ever heard in his short three months in close contact with the navy and sailors in general.

The ship was empty with only 14 people left aboard and they were now letting a shuttle full of unknown, un-vetted people of suspect origins aboard. All because they had an emergency beacon active? Wasn't this supposed to be a restricted zone under military exclusion protocols? How in Hell Everburning had they gotten this close to the SeaQuest in the first place? Why not direct them to the Bush group above? If their navigation system and rudders were damaged they could wait for a pair of MR shuttles from the carrier and its escorts to lift them up. There was ABSOLUTELY no need to get them inside the SQ under any reasoning by anybody who thought strategically or militarily.

Lucas was a sixteen years old civilian without any military training or experience but even he could figure out that "military exclusion zone" and "tactical alert status" meant you don't invite people inside the hull, especially with the short staff and only five security officers left aboard, one of which was that fat slow-mo crud Crocker...

Could anybody but him see this was gonna go down in the annals of the Navy as a monumentally bad idea with catastrophic consequences?

There were days when Lucas thought that the US President had signed off on his inclusion to the ship's crew just to have at least one clear-headed, right-thinking person aboard ship to offset the collective ineptitude of the other 234 narcissistic self-deluded children that composed the staff. And he wasn't even paid for this. He wasn't even lodged in a room fit for human habitation. He was barely fed and had to scream bloody blue murder to get anything for his most basic necessities when others wasted food they didn't really need or want and indulged in booze, drugs, porn and playing video games right on the ship's control consoles instead of doing their damn jobs...

Where the fuck were NCIS and the FBI in all this? Probably in a bar in DC wailing about their budgets getting cut because general so-and-so's latest toy had busted the bank for no visible results. Again.

Well, t'was useless to mope and cry about it now. The bastards were about to enter the hull and he had precious few minutes to lock down everything tighter than his bitch mother's cold unbeating heart before the organically extruded matter embraced the rotating pneumatic machinery and aspersed all of their poor lowly lives with its ever-loving crap.

"Harken and hold fast, boy! Time to save the lives and skins of the undeserving and be accounted a good guy again." Lucas whispered to himself cynically as he left the conference room and entered the maglev to reach his cabin faster. The horizontal transport was supposed to have been shut off during the test but the teenager was the ship's premier cyberneticist and had overrides on everything with a CPU in it, including Dr Cranston's cardiac pacemaker and the vocalizer in the head of seaman Dannon's cheap, squicky inflatable rubber doll that he though nobody knew about.

Lucas ignored the sudden indignant bitchings from commander Ford coming out of the maglev speakers and his PAL in a weird stereo effect. The boy was well aware the lift was supposed to be offline, parked in its maintenance position as he was the one to place and lock the carriage that way. That was the logical thing to do given that they would flood the inside of the ship to test the siphons. But since flooding a functional nuclear ship was illogical and accepting unknown strangers aboard said nuclear ship at the same time was even more illogical, Lucas thought he was entitled to put logic in the bin and do what was necessary to survive the coming tidal wave of horror that was mere minutes from swamping them.

Like any boy born and raised in America in the last century, Lucas knew well the one and true way of getting through a mess when it happened. If the people around you put logic and morality in the trash, pull out the guns and knives and get badder than the neighbors. When your survival was in doubt, having the bigger, stronger hand-cannon would always see you safe and sound at the end of the day.

More madness in the halls

(Angels in Cages - Caravan of Thieves)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 07:36am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat

North of the Australian coastline

Colonel Shraeder, formerly of the UN blue helmets and the US marines before that, was giving the gimlet eye towards his "men" if they could be called so. They were physically, morally and intellectually a poor showing compared to what he used to command in the corps. The shuttle they had commandeered to do this mission was a civilian thing without any armor, weapons or even any type of self-inflating lifting gear in case of accidents. It was a piece of crap redeemed only by the high-class scientific comms and sensors that were built-in all around the boat. Small mercies, such as they were, he would take and be thankful for. It's not like he'd get anything else positive out of this damn job.

"All right, you twits! Were docked in! Open the top hatch and run for your lives! We have less than 20 seconds before the bridge reacts to what they see on their monitors! Go! Go!" he screamed at the thirty assembled mercenaries jam-packed inside the cramped university shuttle.

There was a mad dash up the ladder and the whine of compressed-air guns going off, shooting tranq darts at the two shuttle silo operators to knock them out without killing or injuries. Shraeder had insisted on a bloodless action before he accepted the job. The ship's crew were not his enemies and he was no traitor, he would not shoot to kill against these men.

As he went up the ladder himself he was greeted by his Ex-O that informed him they had penetrated the ship's corridors already and were in the process of opening the doors towards the bridge area. The maglev was offline and parked in its maintenance slot, as foreseen by their planners. The former US Infantry corporal was surprised at the lack of armed reaction so far. He had expected the few people onboard to activate defenses or remotely close and lock doors but that wasn't happening so they were in luck. Both Shraeder and him knew it would not last long.

Just as the colonel gave instructions to keep two men inside the shuttle to keep it ready for departure they heard an eerie whine followed by the shushing noise of pressured gas flowing from nozzles above the doors around the parking silo hub. In a cacophony of inhuman screams, five of their mercs fell to the deck plates, bloated and discolored from the clouds of wet steam heated to 400 degrees Celsius that killed them instantly.

Shraeder was practically foaming at the mouth rabidly as he bellowed orders to his people to get to engineering and shut off the damned plumbing before they lost more men. He wanted water, air, heat, gas and sewage completely shut off Right-Fucking-Now if not sooner. As the mercs ran off in three different directions to find and disable the central life support controls, the colonel turned to his Ex-O and asked tartly "Are you happy about their defenses now?"

Wisely choosing silence, the soldier-for-hire walked out of the control hub, heading towards the bridge where all the critical data access was centralized and locked. Hopefully, there weren't anymore built-in structural defenses like those steam pipes spread around. Frowning in worry, the soldier remembered their briefing before leaving the rallying base and clearly recalled that they had been told the boat had never been built, or even conceived, with active lethal defenses like that. The worse they were supposed to encounter were automated doors and maybe the crew would try to suck the air out of a few sections, but nothing this aggressive or fatal. Damn! What else had they got wrong or out of date?

A long, painful, inarticulate scream of misery resounded through the corridors when they were halfway to the bridge doors. Pushing the button on his talkie, the corporal asked for call-in from all personnel. Two failed to answer back. Looking at Shraeder's closed-off face, the merc ordered a team of two to find their missing people and call in the moment they were spotted. This wasn't good.

"Damn, boss! Were not five minutes aboard and we lost seven people already! That's not the briefing we got this morning! SeaQuest was supposed to be an easy target with weaklings inside. Who botched the intel?" the low-rank soldier asked his chief.

The colonel was thinking about events and came up with numbers he really didn't like. They were down almost a quarter of their fighting force and had barely set foot in the place, let alone got near the critical system yet. This would not be a good day; he could feel it in the marrow of his bones. SeaQuest may have offloaded most of her crew but somehow they kept the Guardian Beast aboard. They would all bleed and weep before noon; he could see the writing on the wall well enough to predict this.

Ah, Hells!

(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 07:46am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat

North of the Australian coastline

The team of two soldiers dispatched by the corporal didn't need to go far from the silo hub to find their missing mercs. They also didn't have to wait long to find their breakfasts again as they splashed from their mouths onto the decking. What was left of the two unfortunate soldiers-for-hire needed a shopvac to recover rather than a gurney or body bag.

After a few minutes of retching, the older of the two wiped his mouth and then flicked his talkie to call his boss. "Heya boss, we found our two missing guys. Not much left of them though. They got sprayed with somethan' that ate em up. They look like dog barf to be honest. Anything on your end? Over."

The mercenary knew they'd get yelled at, especially for puking their guts out the way they did, but he didn't care anymore. Five minutes in and they had 25% of their lot on the carpet never to get up again, it wasn't what they signed up for. Somebody on this tub had a nasty temper and the two guys were willing to bet it wasn't Shraeder or his Ex-O Claude Hanson who had the worse attitude anymore.

The talkie beeped and the corporal's voice came out "Tell me which frame you're at then get back to your group and stay together. No more lonesome exploring or going off script. We lost too many right out of the blocks to allow for more deaths. Over."

After answering their boss, the two mercs decided to stop by the lavatory hall near the shuttle hub to wash out their mouths and take a breath before jumping in again. Both were cousins who had worked together for over a decade, mostly doing errands, running merchandise of the hot and bothersome variety and dodging the Law at every chance. Heavy action and violence like this wasn't their thing, not if they could avoid it. They took the gig cause Shraeder said it'd go off without shooting anybody.

Funny innit how come nobody told the other guys that tidbit...

As they both went inside the showering and toilet hall, the door closed behind them automatically and would not open again until the Bush carrier group's rescue teams came and swept the ship for intruders and bodies. They would need body bags and HAZMAT suits to clean the room.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…

(The Sealed Kingdom – Adrian Von Ziegler)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 08:14am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, deck-A near the bridge doors

North of the Australian coastline

As colonel Shraeder, formerly of the US Marines Corps and the UN Blue Helmets, walked slowly down the deck-A corridor towards the bridge, everything seemed to go quietly just as the tactical forecasters of his employers had planned.

The shiver of dread sliding down his spine was not imaginary.

Any man, woman or unlucky misbegotten child that had ever served in an armed troupe knew from bitter personal experience that NOTHING ever goes according to plan, especially when the plans are created out of thin air by office-bound minions devoid of any genuine field experience to use in their machinations. And being the commander of an entrenched compound or a massive aircraft carrier did not count as field experience in any way worth mentioning. Those positions removed their commanders so far away from reality and their own men's lives that they weren't experimenting anything but paperwork and ass-kissing. And that was the good commanders; the average bloke just put his yeoman in the doorway and told them to blockade all incoming so it didn't reach the Big Man.

Snort! And those people call themselves servicemen? Please! The civilian scientists that were usually aboard the SeaQuest were more real servicemen than all of the Brass-level officers Shraeder ever saw in his life.

Arriving wearily at the clamshell doors on the bridge's right side, next to the maglev terminal, the fallen colonel saw that his present workforce had actually managed to pull their finger out and got the hydraulic clamp installed and ready to pull apart the door valves. Humph! Maybe they could actually pull this off as he wanted. Shraeder did not see himself as a traitor even though legally and morally that was his status. He saw himself as the tool by which a solution to the pollution of the oceans would be achieved. If he had to break laws and reputations, so be it. Breaking bodies and lives however, that had not been acceptable in his agenda. The cause needed to stay clean and presentable or they would fail at winning public support. Also, he did not initially see the people aboard ship as real enemies, just small obstacles that could be convinced to stand aside or be run-around easily.

Optimism in warfare meant botched plans that got men killed

Shraeder had managed to convince the mercenaries that the bloodless strategy would work better and they would have less to fear after leaving the ship as nobody would be screaming for vengeance. That the job would require twice more men and time was the accepted compromise but the employers, the planners and the mercs all ended up agreeing that the UEO would be less fanatical about finding them if no blood was spilled.

So far, nobody was getting what they planned or wanted. Big surprise there.

Shraeder still had that damnable shiver slowly crawling down his spine, warning him that the organic excretions were about to encounter a rotating pneumatic device and be reattributed most generously across all of their lives. Damn, he hated having gut feelings like those! Especially since normally, they ended up with him in an anonymous clinic somewhere getting stitched up by a quack that was popping more pills than he gave his patients before operating on them.

Shraeder's Ex-O, former USMC corporal Claude Hanson, gestured at his Boss to come and look over the setup before they powered up to force the doors.

"Hey Boss. We purged the oil out of the doors' mechs to make them less resistant to movement and we took out the manual breaks that were hidden inside the frames in the walls. We're good to go online."

Shraeder gave the entire apparatus a gimlet eye, still weary of his bad feelings, and backed up a good ten feet with Hanson at his side before signaling the team to crack the bridge. As the whine of the electrical machine was heard, a small scratching noise came from the ventilation ducts in the ceiling above the colonel's head. Hard earned reflexes and long-used skills at tumbling out of the enemy's line of fire had him jumping backwards and rolling on the floor away from the area just four seconds before it all went bad.

A miniature canister dropped from the ventilation grate in the ceiling, dropping just in the middle of the team of four mercenaries working by the clamshell doors. It exploded about four feet off the ground, disbursing a five feet wide cloud of atrociously eye-searing fluorescent pink gas that covered the men, machines and walls. Everything stood still for about three seconds and then the screaming began.

The men dropped everything they held and began scratching out their eyes or ears, dropping to the floor to roll around in frantic, desperate panic. It was now obvious that they were trying to avoid or run away from something that they thought was attacking them, trying to crawl on their bodies and get inside of them.

Shraeder had his confirmation when a dingy little ditty began playing through the Public Address system speakers in the corridor, putrefying the air with its toxically ironic words.

(The Hearse Song - Brillig)

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out

The worms play pinochle on your snout

They eat your eyes, they eat your nose

They eat the jelly between your toes

Do you ever think when a hearse goes by that you may be the next to die?

They wrap you up in a big white sheet from your head down to your feet

They put you in a big black box and cover you up with dirt and rocks

All goes well for about a week

Then your coffin begins to leak and reek!

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out

The worms play pinochle on your snout

They eat your eyes, they eat your nose

They eat the jelly between your toes

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out

Be merry my friends, be merry!

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out

Be merry my friends, be merry!

Be merry my friends, be merry!

"Mwuhahaha! Harken and Behold, ye landlubbing knaves, that which your Lord hath wrought! This be the end of all traitors and curs upon these waves! Arrrgh!" a young man's darkly amused voice shouted through the PA speakers along the evil laughter.

Shraeder now knew what had caused his men to collapse into psychotic breakdowns; they had been poisoned so as to hallucinate being eaten alive by worms while locked inside a buried coffin. They had scratched out their eyes, ears, tongues and good portions of their exposed skin thus grievously maiming themselves for the rest of their lives. If they didn't die of blood loss, they would recover from the poison, become aware of their now handicapped state and commit suicide rather than live out their existences with diminished capacities like this.

So much for SeaQuest being a weak, undefended target during the hull siphon tests.

Hearing a weird mechanical noise in the venting ducts inside the ceiling, the corporal placed his cellphone inside through the grate just above himself and filmed a few seconds before pulling back. When he replayed the film for Shraeder, they saw what looked like a child's remote controlled toy car except it had a large pincer on the rear bumper which held another canister similar to the one that dropped from the vent a minute ago.

Somebody was compensating for the ship's lack of static structural defenses by improvising mobile ones with cheap Radio Shack toys and repurposed riot-police gas grenades. Who in their right mind would deliver warfare-grade chemical weapons by the vents using toy cars? What kind of madhouse had they stepped into?

"Shraeder to hub! We lost the clamshell doors' team. Send another four guys. The bridge doors won't open nicely on their own; we still have to force the issue to be allowed in. Over."

As the veteran soldier took his fingers off the talkie's button, one of the search teams called in and asked the fatidic question: "Has anybody heard from the Marlow cousins yet? They found our guys by the entrance to the shuttle hub's support equipment section but we haven't a peep from either since... Over."

The corporal was quite industriously working on cleaning the poisonous crud from the hydraulic jack and its wires besides the clamshell doors and made certain to give no outward signs of having followed the convo behind him. Given the furious look on the colonel's face, it was better that way. The SeaQuest's crew had demonstrated to be far more bloodthirsty than their planners had told them; he had no intention to face even worse odds at the hands of his own boss.

Running amok everywhere

(Two of Us - Curtis Eller's American Circus)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 08:21am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat

North of the Australian coastline

Lucas whistled gaily, quite off-key and quite badly, a most lurid tavern song straight out of the 17th century about captains, cabin boys and phallically shaped wooden peg legs that were used for a lot more than just walking around on the decks of wooden sail ships. Now, Lucas had a very good musical ear, a decent singing voice and even composed a few things for his synthesizer keyboard but there was just something more delinquent, more fun, about singing ribald lewdness when truly off-key in an ear-gouging tone.

Pity he was the only one listening to his phonic exploits. Ah well, 'beggars can't be choosers' the proverb goes.

Opening a large metallic box that was securely bolted to the wall and covered in colored decals warning people to most specifically NOT OPEN the thing, the teen dropped the broken padlock he had cracked and used his now free hands to pull on his thick leather and rubber insulated gloves. After making sure both hands were covered, he then proceeded to do what would give Hitchcock three different conniptions at the same time: he swung the red fire ax he took from its place in the wall mounted emergency equipments cabinet and aimed at the principal power allotment breakers.

The way the ship's electricity was made and spread was simple: you had a set of one cold fusion reactor, two chemical reactors, two diesel-electric engines as back-ups and several huge acid-based batteries. All these devices had armored wires that pooled together and went up to here: the central control panels, also known as the main spread-out breakers. Each deck was dedicated one large locked box inside which there was a massive breaker for the central power coming into the junction and about three dozen smaller breakers to manage the power outgoing to specific areas of each deck without having to leave this nice, heavily armored and insulated room just a hundred feet behind the humongous spherical construct that housed the parking silos for the ship's dependent craft. There was a similar console set-up in engineering but it was a back-up, not the main one. Also, each deck had a smaller local breaker box at the entry of each of the sectors that were represented by a lever in front of Lucas.

By putting his ax through the wires of specifically chosen levers, he could cripple the ship's mobility and weapons without ever compromising life support or the parking silos. He HAD to keep the silos operational as the SQ did not have escape pods of any sort. To evacuate the ship under duress the crew needed to use the shuttles and sea crabs or take the ship to the surface and get out in the inflatable emergency rafts. Bridger's original designs had in fact included the very first models of submersible escape pods ever to grace an American sub but the cheapskates in the Pentagon and the Capitol had axed the idea just as surely as Lucas had just consigned the ship to parking itself here for the next week until the breaker boxes could be fixed properly.

Well, with either Kathy or himself doing the job, it would take about two hours tops.

The invaders on the other hand, would need a month just to figure out Ben's inventory management system, followed by another month to track down where the parts were hidden in the ship. The fact Lucas had used his cellphone to send a voice command to malware he had buried in all of the ships communications, emails, TXT, SMS, and all manner of accounting documents that were produced or transited by their servers could not in any way be responsible for Ben's inventory suddenly being encrypted with a 4024-bit system that needs to be unlocked by a password sung in gregorian tonalities while Darwin MUST be laughing in the background. No, it never could be his fault...

Snorting in derision at the menial idiocy of terrorists, criminals and everybody the least little bit close to the military world in general, the adolescent hoisted his new steel toy onto his left shoulder and pulled a granola bar out of his flannel shirt pocket. He slowly munched his meager dry breakfast as he moved to the next phase of his active resistance to the beknaved twits that dared to invade his territory.

SeaQuest might be a shitpit filled with dipshits, but they still belonged to him and he wasn't the sharing type. He learned that attitude from his mother. It was her fault he had a cold dead rock for a heart. It was also her fault that he stayed sane enough to be aware of that state of affairs while not having enough emotions to care a whit.

Bless the little children... Then curse the mongrels all through adolescence

(Graveyard - Devil Makes Three)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 08:29am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, deck-A around the bridge

North of the Australian coastline

Colonel Shraeder was impatiently gazing over the shoulders of his four new men as they were setting up the hydraulic pincers to force open the doors that kept them away from the bridge and its treasure trove of encrypted classified data. His Ex-O was busy finishing the task of draining the oil out of the hydraulic lines that moved the massive doors so that their own machinery would strain less as it worked to open the clamshells.

The disgraced marine was making an effort to ignore the four quickly decomposing stinking corpses on the floor, all pushed further back along the side of the wall, just like the other five mercenaries in the corridor with him who had obvious trouble concentrating on their jobs. Looking upwards at the vent grates they had blocked off, the veteran soldier wondered again what happened to their erstwhile opponent to keep him silent so long. It never bodes well when the enemy is silent; it means he's planning something both devious and cruel to inflict upon unsuspecting men.

If the colonel still had his original platoon of marines he would have been hopeful of getting the job done despite the odds. With these guys, though... And the Beast... He was facing the Guardian Beast...

A slightly pudgy, out of shape young man dressed in the same grey combat fatigues as the rest of the mercs came up to the colonel and leaned against the wall, trying to catch up his breath. He panted while looking around at the dead bodies, wide-eyed in fear, worried that the mysterious enemies who killed so many of their men would materialize out of thin air.

Shraeder grunted an odd sound at the man, either a welcome or contempt for his lack of physical capacities, it could mean anything. The new man straightened up and held one of his three leather work satchels close to his chest, like a shield against the harsh, violent world around himself.

"Bowman! Did you manage to find anything about the state of the ship and her systems yet? I'm not paying you to just hold the tech until we need it like a damn coat rack! Tell me something useful for a change!"

Lance Bowman swallowed passed the dry lump in his throat, remembering that while Shraeder had wanted a bloodless mission, the outcome was already quite different than expected. This meant of course the man had frayed nerves and might not shy away from hurting or killing anybody in his own team that he saw as too useless or just too weak to follow through with the final mission goals.

Getting himself under a semblance of control, the IT engineer stared Shraeder straight in the eyes and answered the bad news he had come to deliver. "Well, we won't be going anywhere in this tub anymore; the main drive, auxiliaries and positioning thrusters are all offline. There isn't any electricity going anywhere to those compartments, our guys say that even the lights don't turn on. That means that somebody got to the main breakers and sabotaged the entire electrical grid right at the source. I accessed the officer-level diagnostics tools that I hacked in preparation for the mission and they show that the only things left with any power in the cables are life support and the shuttle hangars. Everything else from weapons to laboratories to public toilets are all dark until we find the wires that are cut and fix them."

Shraeder pursed his lips in thought and asked "Did you send a team to find the damages? I hope it's not another ambush like what was waiting for us here the first time around."

Bowman shook is head negatively "I already know what was done and where. The basic security cameras are part of the life support systems that's not off-line since they are connected to the same circuit as the emergency lights in case of fire and main power shut down so they still work fine. I traced the power cables from the fusion core and hit a snag in the principal distribution node on deck-D not far from the actual engine block. By the images, it looks like somebody took an axe and slashed the wires coming out of the main breakers and also smashed out several specific breaker levers to take out systems. It would take four to six hours just to fix the wires themselves, another four or so for the levers and safety fuses behind each. All in all SQ's crippled but awake, just like a quadriplegic in a hospital bed. Awake and aware, but immobile and defenseless."

Shraeder swore lowly before turning towards his men at the clamshells. "Get them doors opened! Now! We need inside there to save our lives just as much as to get the payday we came for! This is no longer a game! We have a heavy prowling the corridors looking for blood. We either get in the bridge to loot the datastacks or we leave the ship empty handed right away. If we do that, the chances of our employers having an understanding reaction to our hasty retreat are nil. The way things are, we find a way to survive aboard this derelict or we die out there when our backer hunts us down for our failure."

(The X Files – opening theme)

The five soldiers got back to work with added vigor and speed whilst Bowman signaled the colonel to pull back with him so they could speak quietly. "I found something critical in the open systems when I scanned them before joining you here. We have a hacker on board. Most specifically, it's somebody rated as a 'High-Lord Grand-Master Splicer' that's on the lookout lists of every police, security and intelligence agency that I could interrogate to confirm his ID, even though there's no warrants or BOLO on him, just notifications to be very careful with him and not piss him off. Here's the picture from his shipboard access card. You'll note that he's listed as the SQ's 'Chief Computer Analyst' and 'Chief of Mammal Engineering' right from the moment he first boarded the ship in New Cape Quest three months back."

Shraeder looker at the file displayed on the touchscreen tablet, staring at the photograph in disbelief. This was the guy he had heard about in dark corners of forlorn taverns and unplumbed depths of the Dark Net when he trawled for jobs? A bloody kid! He was just turned 16 years old last December for Christ's sake! What fucking pit of bitch crap had they fallen in?

"Bowman, are you sure? This is the CCA for the boat? He's not just a junior assistant or a receptionist or something low-key like that? What are his pass-codes? What's his access like in the systems?"

Lance Bowman shook his head again and replied dourly "I can't breach his file beyond the public service jacket on the ship's publicly accessible website that they made for the population to browse and get infos about the ship's official mission and commercial projects. Anything about the kid is under the kind of security level and encryption that make me wonder if anyone beneath the armed services' Chiefs-of-staff at the White House could get anything. I doubt even captain Bridger has access high enough or vetted enough to read anything in that particular file. The kid is armor-plated, despite that he seems to come out of nowhere and have no familial or social attachments that I could find besides the publicly stated parentage and schooling."

The colonel grunted in dismay "That smells like a back-stopped cover, or at least a heavily redacted, read-with-eyes-only program like the CIA or NSA run when they go deeper-than-Dark on an emergent threat inside the US or NATO territory. Not good. At all. Try to find everything else on him as soon as you connect your machines and the data downloads are in progress. My gut tells me this is the bastard that's been offing our guys and we can't afford to dismiss or underestimate his threat level. 16 year old kids don't reach senior officer positions on nuclear warships just as a favor to daddy, no matter which ass Lawrence Alexander Wolenczak kissed at the Pentagon."

"The truth is out there" Bowman thought in amused silence as he planned how to hack deeper into the impressive cybernetic defenses the ship's servers boasted. Now that he knew who custom-made those programs and defenses, he wasn't surprised anymore. Even the most menial hacker would protect his own backyard first and foremost, then do the assorted jobs on his docket. Lucas Wolenczak had obviously done much above just 'due diligence' when securing his digital domain, as expected of his presence aboard. Which in itself explained and justified easily the expenditures and problems caused by him being here.

The grinding of the clamshells opening manually, and forcibly, interrupted further planning just as much as the sound of a gun and the sudden death of the poor idiot standing in the doorway while it moved. Apparently, the bridge crew were alive and kicking to receive them. Good. They could answer some questions about the little runt while the data was being stolen under their collective noses.

A strange chill wind passed around Shraeder's spine, making him look behind himself just to be certain everything was empty in the corridor. All the other guys were patrolling and gathering the remaining crew in the mess hall to facilitate detention. He needed to check on them soon. He had a bad feeling suddenly that he was perhaps too late already.

Be merry my friends, be merry!

(The hearse song - Brillig)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 08:47am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat

North of the Australian coastline

Chief of security Lieutenant (senior grade) Manilow Crocker huffed an exasperated breath as he climbed down the stairs in the dreary shadowed corridors again to avoid another enemy search party. Apparently, the invaders knew how many of theirs were left aboard and they were searching the whole boat repeatedly until they had the full tally, despite losing power to two thirds of the ship and everything being dark. Well, he wished them all the ill luck that they could get and Lucas's intervention on top! Crocker may be old, fat and washed out as an officer due to his many indiscretions, alcoholism and bum knee that got broke twice too many times in bar fights, but that didn't mean he was either blind, deaf or dumb, no matter what Noyce thought.

Their pale-skinned little Casper look-alike wan't no angel in training, he could tell you that much just by the look in the kid's eyes when he was pissed so hard he was repressing the urge to do bodily harm unto the redneck idjiot that bothered him.

Men who had killed humans don't have the same eyes as others who never did.

Westphalen and a fair few more aboard were landlubber fools for not seeing that clearly. Even Nate, blind as a mole and higher than a kite on bad days knew better than to discount the kid on just his age and the way he dressed or spoke. Snort! Any raw recruit that finished Boot Camp alive oughta have the brains to see a teenager doesn't get a job that normally goes to a man three times his age just cuz daddy sucked Billy-Boy's 'nads in DC to lubricate the deal.

This had all the hallmarks of 'Black Operations' in a 'Deeper-than-Black' kinda ways that set his blood to freeze in his old heart. A teenaged man-killer with a high tolerance for bloodshed and the cold calculative temperament to keep himself in line without anybody to hold his hand. A competent, reserved and calm individual with mental capacities at multi-genius super-prodigy level and the self-discipline to control himself and others to force through the successful completion of his mission.

They weren't fucked just a bit, weren't they...?

Crocker's PAL vibrated silently; no sound, no lights and almost no shaking. If he hadn't held it in his hand he could have missed it. Not that it mattered as that was a TXT message coming in. Lucas again. He just cleaned out two more mercs who tried to take liberties with the female engineer that Kathy had assigned to watch over the fusion core. They thought they could take turns raping her before bringing her to the mess hall to park her with the others. They wouldn't be raping or killing anybody else anymore. Pity the poor engineer was traumatized more by what Lucas did than the attempted rape.

Ah well, such were the vagaries of warfare. Nobody won anything and the survivors often wished they had'na lived through it awake and conscious.

Now then, where was that blasted little prick he heard mucking about?

Crocker placed his PAL back in its holster and took a two-handed grip on the crowbar he had appropriated from a firefighting equipment closet two decks down earlier this morning when the lights went out all over ship. If Lucas gave the signal they were doing a silent run against the enemy's baffles, well then, he the old submariner would oblige him quite kindly. It was part and parcel of submarine life after all, doing stuff silently in the dark.

Something that some malecon and his arm-twisters should'a remembered a'fore they pissed on his patch.

"Ah, there you are! Come to grandpa little kiddie, he has a world o' hurt just for you! He, He, He!"

One heavy overhead swing later and the (now confirmed) brainless minion would no longer be prowling the halls for defenseless women to assault. Crocker passed the crowbar into his belt to hold it in place while he huffed and strained against the 250 pounds of deadweight he was trying to pull out of view and into a nicely positioned recycling chute that went all the way down to deck-E where the triage room and trash bins were. After relieving the bloke of his 9mm Glock pistol, AR-15 assault rifle and four flash-bang grenades, three knives and two garrotes, Manilow was relatively certain the guy was now divested of all useful stuff and pushed / dumped him into the chute.

Why in tarnation had Nathan designed these things big enough to pass even somebody of his own corpulent girth wearing full body armor was gonna remain a mystery. Crocker knew about his friend's short stint of detached duty in the CIA during the 1980's at the very beginning of his Navy career and wasn't gonna ask details. He didn't want the headaches, nightmares and paperwork that came with the answers. Not to mention that knowing would probably give him enough a boost in his security clearance to know about why Lucas was really aboard and he could very well live without that particular stain on his soul.

Manilow's PAL vibrated again, this time hard enough to shake even the hip holster where it was stored. The older officer took it out and used his pudgy fingers to dexterously work the small buttons and miniature touchscreen until he could read the message. The red characters and flashing emergency banner around the message text were enough to tell him something bad had happened.

The mercs were in the bridge and they had killed two people. They had judged the pair of helmsmen to be useless as the ship was paralyzed and immobilized so they killed them off. The merc Boss kept Kathy Hitchcock and Jonathan Ford alive to pump them for information and as hostages, just in case he needed to negotiate safe passage off ship. Those two seemed safe, for now anyways. There was a batch of their other crewmen being pooled into the mess hall on deck-B to better contain them.

With both Lucas and himself prowling about, it would'na work all that well for them, no matter what they tried to do.

Crocker stashed the PAL back at his hip and took the bloodied crowbar back in his favored two-handed grip as he set about hunting for two-legged rats in the depths of SeaQuest's darkened bowels. They may have guns and grenades but he had stealth and the lay of the land on his side.

He also had the uncontrollable, unpredictable adolescent pest mucking about but that wan't on nobody's side so he didn't really count him as an asset. Manilow just hoped he wouldn't be declared as another enemy on top of the mercs. Nobody knew what would eventually set off the kid and he prayed today wasn't it.

Hack & Slash like in a Dungeons & Dragons game

(The Straight Razor Cabaret - Voltaire)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 09:00am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat

North of the Australian coastline

The arterial spray pulsed hard and strong all the way up to the pipes and grates along the ceiling of the compartment, painting them red in an artistic swirl that could only be achieved the natural way. With a warm body, a black soul and a sharp blade wielded carelessly by the hand of someone long passed caring about the value or sanctity of human existence.

Lucas stood back, watching detachedly as the lifeblood of his Nth victim of the day stopped arcing in the air and just flowed lazily down the front of his barely clothed chest. Who the hell was it that was stupid enough to come on an armed raid wearing just jeans and a t-shirt under his flack vest? Then the fucking asshole stops all alone in a dark room for a puff on a joint? Pathetic. Even as a civilian kid Lucas knew better than to pull crap like that on an operation in progress.

Stepping forward, the teen grabbed a clean segment of the cooling corpse's shirt and wiped clean his small blade. The diminutive implement was 4 inches long in total, the blade had two edges, both smooth and sharper than any scalpel or straight razor. The grip was flat, matte black rubber and exactly the same size as the blade to balance it for throwing and palming blindly during a scuffle.

The straight half-inch wide stiletto-style blade favored short stabbing motions aimed at strategic points of the body rather than wide slashing gestures. This was a precise tool of cold assassination and cruel bloodletting, not butchery and open combat. It was perfect to be kept discreetly in a sleeve or belt sheath under an oversized flapping flannel shirt, the way 80% of young men in North America and Europe dressed.

Lucas had forged and honed the titanium alloy himself. He had fitted the ergonomic grip himself. He had done like the Japanese sword-masters and tested it on five throats and spines before declaring the blade's design true and reliable. Then he produced three dozen which he promptly squirreled away for the inevitable moment when society decided to beat him down and show him just how little valued his life, health and welfare were.

Man, would people get a surprise when they tried that! Lucas had a list of victims longer than both arms and he hadn't really bothered counting those that died in groups or under the obscure cloak of closed rooms and booby traps. Only those he finished off face-to-face deserved to be remembered, if only to analyze how his equipment and weapons had performed versus the opponent in question.

Lucas remembered facts and figures, data streams and columns of numbers incredibly well. Human faces and identities... Not so much... Mostly because he couldn't be arsed to bother, let alone care.

He blamed dear old dad for his chronic apathy and crass disregard for humanity and life in general. Just take a look at how the man manages his only child's life and you'll understand a great deal of how Lucas became the way he is.

Secreting the minuscule blade back in its hidden sheath at the small of his back, the teenager calmly frisked the exsanguinated cadaver for any equipment of use or resalable value. The 9mm Glock and AR-15 were of course obvious. The knives were sub-par and too big for Lucas's tastes but he took them anyways while thinking of arming those members of the crew that would soon be freed from captivity. The man also had a steel-wire garrote, steel knuckles with spikes, and the most obviously fake cheap throwing stars that Lucas ever saw. These things were probably sold online to kids and wannabe ninjas who couldn't afford the real weapons. Fucktard.

Silently emptying the guy's wallet of all cash for his own use, Lucas eyed the credit cards and wondered again at which dirty, forlorn backwater tavern these mercs had been hired from. Who the hells came on a sensitive SECRET mission to hijack a military ship with his pockets full of personal informations and giveaways? Shaking his head in disgust at such incompetence, the boy opened the small bag still containing six small mediocre joints and smelled them. Bah! Cheap stuff cut with tobacco, portioned out in half doses to make it too weak to incapacitate the user. Useless for resell and Lucas would never be stupid or desperate enough to use them himself. Down that road lay misery, uncertainty and waste.

Dropping the dope on the floor, he kept looking around the dead man until a small bit of leather thread caught his attention. There, attached to the inside of the left boot, was an item that looked like a medallion or pendant. It was darkly colored and very thin, and invisible as it was pushed down almost to the ankle. Pulling it out, Lucas saw that it was actually a small amulet made of stone-like substance with engravings on both sides. The grayish stone meant he had to look at the medallion from very close in the darkened room to see the silver inlayed into the etchings. This was no cheap talisman sold in a tourist shop. The piece of jewelry had an icon – religious? – on one side and what looked like text on the reverse. It didn't look like any of the multiple tongues that Lucas had learned. It honestly didn't look like any human tongue used on earth, either in the past or now.

The teenager knew his worse weakness in his character was his oversized brain and overactive mind which lead to an insatiable curiosity, especially towards the unusual, forbidden and hidden things that humanity tries to forget. This medallion seemed to fit in several of these categories.

Ah well, he needed a new hobby anyways...

Hearing a noise by the doorway behind him, the boy hunched down to make himself smaller and retreated sideways in crab-like fashion until he was partly hidden by the desk and chairs. He took the Glock and silently cocked it, taking off the safety with an unconscious flip of the thumb. The adolescent flexed his trigger finger a few times to get a feel of the gun mechanism's sensitivity while his eyes tracked the shape of the man that walked into the compartment after pushing open the door that had stayed ajar the whole time bloody murder was carried out inside the anonymous office. Lucas switched the view mode inside his eyes so he could perceive the heat spectrum to follow the movements of the man. It allowed him to confirm what he had heard with his extra-sensitive ears, another merc loitering outside the office, waiting on his partner to give the all clear or call for help.

The game was up, it seemed... Well, no.

Lucas's left hand went to his belt line and swiftly pulled out his small knife and had it pointing forward in a blink just as he placed the gun next to his head, pointing upwards as he coiled himself to spring into action.

As the mercenary walked into the office using a glow stick to see the carnage wreaked by unknown enemies, he was completely taken off guard when the slightly built, underfed and overworked teenager jumped up in his blind spot and rammed two inches of titanium steel into his spinal column, rendering him both quadriplegic and dead at the same time.

The boy pulled his blade loose at the same time as he dropped the pistol in line with the space between the door and doorframe. He let the new cadaver drop noisily on the floor and, just as planned, the noise brought in his partner. The man was scowling something fierce as he stormed into the dark compartment, an angry put-down on his lips about wastrel scum who should be doing their jobs, not be looting around for coins and dope in the dead of night.

His anger towards his merc buddy and disbelief at seeing a kid in the room were both silenced to the tune of a loud 'BANG' as the 9mm parabellum shell tore through his face, just a bit beneath the right eye socket and into his brain after that then exiting the cranium's rear in an explosive cloud of blood and brains.

Jumping over the blood pool on the carpeted office floor to avoid soiling his shoes and leaving red prints along his escape, Lucas quickly moved himself out of the office and then towards the maintenance closet three rooms down. Once in he closed and locked the door so he could act in peace. He ambled over to the floor-set sink & drainage pad where the janitorial crew would wring mops and purge the wheeled washing buckets. The drainage pad was 2 feet wide on each side. It also had a cleverly concealed hinge at the far side, near the wall. Lucas took out a small Allen key from the cuff of his flannel shirt and slotted it into the near lip of the drainage pad to unlock the pin holding the setup in place. Once popped, he lifted the whole thing, revealing a maintenance duct underneath. A man-sized, Lucas-friendly duct.

A few maneuvers later and Lucas was happily worming his way through his favorite, silent and exclusive path around the ship. Nobody could move around these maintenance shafts like he could, given his small size and slight build. Sometimes, being just 5 foot 10 inches and 149 pounds sopping wet could come in handy. Nobody else on board could fit in these ducts as easily and comfortably as he could. Kathy had the size but lacked flexibility. Westphalen was slim enough but too gangly and gauche. Nobody else came close.

Their loss.

Whenever Lucas needed peace and quiet, the maintenance ducts and ventilation pipes provided the best, dry and safe havens he could get inside this floating coffin. The teen was certain Bridger never designed them with that in mind, but would never tell him.

A few more minutes of crawling around and the adolescent arrived at the point where he needed to choose if he came up on top or went down to the lower deck. Hearing some noises from hurried footsteps accompanied by the huffing and grunting of exerted men running towards where the other merc had been shot meant that he was dropping down.

Oh well, he never mucked about deck-E all that much. Might as well enjoy it while he was forced to do it. It's not like anybody was around to scold him or tell him to get lost in somebody else's turf for a change.

They took the ship or the ship took them? Such was the question.

(Sugar in My Coffin - Curtis Eller's American Circus)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 09:25am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat

North of the Australian coastline

The Village Sheriff

(Rivolta Silenziosa – Humanwine)

The mercenaries were panicking all at once. Somebody who was both much more than but also much less than completely human had unleashed nameless horrors and abominations upon their 'inoffensive' and 'defenseless' persons. Hummm… Mercenaries who invade a ship under false pretenses and shoot people to sleep with dart guns while also carrying AR-15's and Glocks 'Inoffensive and defenseless' they say… These guys were obviously in the wrong job category, Senior Lieutenant Manilow Crocker, the ship's chief of security, thought glibly as he listened to the PAL network's phantom surveillance frequency. It worked like an old CB or HAM radio, open to everybody that synthonized the frequency; to contribute you just push the big red button and shout, letting go when you were done.

It made an appropriate and useful background noise while he plied his trade-in-stock, police brutality, upon the oily hide of the unlucky bloke that some tetchy pasty little gremlin in their walls had dropped into the recycling chute just for good old Manny to find and play with. And play he did… There were questions that needed answered on the quick and snappy and some pliers, metal wire and an acetylene blowtorch were a good complement to his electrified nightstick, pepper spray, pulse pistol and brass knuckles. The shelves full of cleaning and decontamination liquids and spray cans could also be put to unhealthy uses if it was discovered that this little fishy was of the durable kind. If all else failed, he could just use the crowbar he still carried around.

A Bill of Ill-Health

(Dr. Flynn - Caravan of Thieves)

Ensign Cy'Bella DiNavarro was a field medic and a damn good one too! She graduated the Naval Academy officer's program with high marks and then went through med school part-time while working on a navy base in the Texas area of the Mexican Gulf as an apprentice ambulance worker and then apprentice nurse in the base hospital before finally taking her full license at the ripe old age of 27 years old. She was shipped from Texas to the SeaQuest on the request of Admiral Noyce without having ever heard of, let alone met, the man before in her life. She was to this date the only medic who could convince either Lucas or captain Bridger to accept sedation during a long-term procedure; everybody else had to do it with just a local anesthesia or pass the bucket her way.

This meant that the poor ensign was actually the one medic aboard who saw more of the two most important, politically and economically connected people aboard. Most people thought Lucas was dirt poor and useless, that it was daddy paying for everything. Most nobody knew nothing about Bridger's money or what he did with it and most seemed to not care. She knew. Patients can be obtuse and close-mouthed when they don't trust you or blab their lives out when they do. She was trusted and so she heard a lot, even stuff she wished she didn't have to.

Unfortunately for the two mercenaries presently strapped on her beds in Convalescence Room 6, immobile and silent due to the drug she had sprayed them with a few minutes ago, she had listened to Lucas. A lot. And a great deal of what he spoke of during the weekly visits to try healing his many injuries and scars wasn't fit even for impolite company in the isolation cells of the psychiatric ward of a super-max penitentiary.

Too damn bad that she had such a good memory and she was an 'auditive' type of learner rather than 'visual' like the overwhelming majority of the population. She heard what the adolescent said and remembered without too much effort… Even in the dead of night when she prayed to God, His Father Joseph and Mother Mary and all His Angels Above to please make her forget so she could sleep without nightmares anymore…

Yes, she remembered what Lucas spoke in hushed tones about the tortures and medical experimentations done to him in his young life. And now these two would remember too and she would engrave it in their skins with blades and acids that she would then ignite so that cleansing fires could purge their Evil whilst inlaying in scarified glyphs what lessons and forbiddings she had taught them.

In the back of her mind - or was it her PAL device in the back pocket of her uniform pants? – she thought she could hear Lucas tell her to wait until they unfroze to hear them scream or else she wouldn't know if she was botching the job or if they felt anything at all. It was morbidly cruel advice but good nonetheless.

She locked the convalescence room door, pulled the blinds and sat with a paperback booklet about traumatology and physiotherapy to wait out the drug's expiration. It would also help guide her blades so that she didn't accidentally kill or maim a man when the CIA and NSA could get so much more out of them than she ever would. She had to be careful about having viable bodies to forward upwards in the custody chain. Who knew? Maybe someone would remark her good efforts and she'd get a bonus at the end of the month.

The Ghosts in the Machinery Rooms

(The Cog is Dead - The Copper War)

The young ensign clenched spastically both hands around the shaft of the massive 20-pound titanium alloy pry-bar, weeping silently in rhythm that matched subconsciously the flow of the congealed blood and brain matter sluggishly sluicing off the metal tool. She had been assaulted, her clothes torn and molested most vilely but, by a miracle of Unholy Darkness given blond hair and blue eyes, she had avoided being fully raped.

Her body had been saved; her mind however had not.

What Lucas did to her two would-be rapists would remain engraved in her soul for the remainder of her days. That a teenager, barely sixteen years old two months ago, could have so much violence in his heart and know so much about pain and torture…

The ensign would forever be grateful to her young savior and call him her friend in broad daylight. At night though, she would batten the hatches, lock all bulkheads and sleep with her back against the wall, clutching a gun and a knife. Just in case her good dark little friend had an urge for a nightcap with her.

It would not be safe to invite him inside her home after lights-out.

Chocking back a gut-wrenching sob as silence was now the only thing keeping her enemies at bay, the female ensign shifted her feet and ever so slowly inched out sideways from between the two large water boilers that fed the steam turbines for the secondary drive shaft assembly. She was finally free to move about the engine compartment as the mercs had come, seen the body and left in a hurry. She could now close the main blast doors and seal the auxiliary hatches to secure the room manually against the invaders. Once in bunker stance, the room could hold out for five solid days. After that, whether the doors were breached was immaterial. She had no reserves of food and no bathroom to bring in fresh water, let alone give her a toilet and a shower stall. Passed five days, she would be dead of thirst and starvation and no longer care anyways.

The young woman tried to calm her heaving chest, desperately trying to ignore the fact that the convulsions were due less to her racing heart than to the dry heaves she started up when her eyes accidentally scanned the bodies as she walked around the consoles to engage the hatches and doors.

A quarter of the room was stained in red mixed with darker splotches from the shredded bits of multiple organs and several negligently artful splashes of brain matter. And Lucas had been negligent in his handling of the guys a whole lot for a machinery compartment of this size to have 25% maculated in body fluids.

Swallowing back the bile that threatened to come up, the sailor did a last check of the doors before moving on to the ventilation ducts and maintenance crawlways. She had not really seen how or where Lucas came in the room but it wasn't by the normal everyday methods. Unlike most others on board, she knew about the tunnels that wormed their way between the decks and rooms of the ship to allow pipes, wires and ducts to reach all the corridors, compartments and machines that kept the ship functioning through all its many jobs. There was no way she was going to let the vent grates and hidden maintenance trapdoors unlocked.

Not if she wanted to truly be safe.

After that, she would busy herself by kneeling on her nice cushy chair and waste her time left until rescue arrived by reciting all the mind-numbing catechism she had rote learned in parochial school in her infancy. At this point, she would even gladly accept strokes of the wooden ruler on her hands when she missed a verse of botched a cardinal rule rather than open her eyes and see anew the results of what Lucas could do with a box cutter, screwdriver, metal wire, axle grease and a fire axe.

"And my brand new best friend the pry-bar that he was kind enough to field test for her to show her the ropes of its usage" she thought while absent-mindedly caressing the object of her safety. It might have been responsible for the man's scrambled brain-gore decorating the walls in a crude attempt at replicating the abstract style of painting but she wan't givin' it up. Nah, han! T'was hers now and she was keepin' it she was! Lucas could just lug around that nice sharp axe he found. And it even had a pointy spike on the back to dig and break through furniture, too. He didn't need her bar so she was keeping it close to her heart, cold and solid, just the way she liked it.

"Hail thee, Blessed Mary, Mother of God, you heart is amongst us, granting us the Grace of its Purity…"

The poor female cried all the tears of her injured soul, alone (she hoped) in the dark room, the only light coming from a few scattered LED indicators on the control panels of heavy machines that flashed softly to indicate what their problems were. She knew what the fucking problems were, damn it all! But what could anybody do when the solution was more damaging than all the nasties put together?

"Still, it was awfully nice of the little guy to let me keep that nice heavy grey pry-bar when he left" she sighed mentally in deep disappointment between prayers. "If only he could have taken the gooey mess and the stench of shit and piss from the men's ruptured bowels when he went… It would have been the decent thing to do, ya know… But he's a boy and they don't clean that good so I guess its normal in a way…"

With another deep sigh and effort of will to ignore the sights, smells and her own tremors of bone-deep anguish, the ensign continued on her self-assigned mind numbing mission to ignore her situation. For once, religion was doing exactly as designed, advertised and taught; it removed her from reality and gave her soul oblivion.

"The Lord is my shepherd…"

This ain't no game no more

(Liberators – Epic Score)

Monday 10th of February, 2020; 10:03am

SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, bridge

North of the Australian coastline

Colonel Shraeder was well passed angry into seeing red as he slowly prowled around the bridge, malicious intent and violence exuding from every pore of his body as he digested the latest news from his Ex-O. Another nine dead men. Three 'missing in action' to keep it exact, but in these circumstances anybody with two neurons to rub together would know that meant deader than a doornail.

They had lost TWO-THIRDS of their forces. How in bloody fucking hell did they lose TWO-THIRDS of their men in two hours? On top of the losses in the shuttle hub, at the bridge doorway, and several disappearances there was now a mini-riot in the mess hall that just left six more of his men dead and the SQ crew thinned out by four bodies but not in the least cowed or submissive.

Rubbing his temples with both hands, the veteran soldier prayed for endurance and patience from any divinity that he'd heard the name of in his life. Strangely enough, it wasn't having any effects...

BEEP! WARBLE! BeeeeeP! "OH for fuck's sake! Not again!" exclaimed Lance Bowman from the science station on the rear-left portion of the bridge. The man was waving his hands around, trying to disperse the new batch of brackish stinking smoke wafting up from the console he was trying to hack for access to the ship's trove of highly classified informations. The system was not cooperating and seemed in fact quite determined to resist his best efforts at charming his way in.

It was the goal of the mission since that's what the clients were paying for. Keeping the mercs and SQ crew alive were neither paid for nor important. In fact, the way things were, the clients might end up wanting to pay to mop up their mercenaries out of existence so they could deny ever being involved with such an ineptly executed operation. Heaven Above knew Shraeder wouldn't put this day on his resume when he went around looking for other jobs to do. Even if he survived to talk about it, let alone carry on as a soldier of fortune, blabbing about doing stuff in the Guardian Beast's backyard was courting bad Karma on a biblical level and nothing somebody with good survival instincts would ever do. Shraeder was both intelligent enough and humble enough to understand that bragging about surviving a close-up with aforementioned Beast was not the best way to guarantee his longevity.

More warbling noises from the rear-bridge caught the colonel's attention as these were of a sort that did not result from Bowman's attempt to hack the datastacks. Turning towards his IT engineer with a stormy expression plastered on his face, the soldier knew in advance that something bad was happening just by the look of haunted fear worn by the younger man.

"What?" he asked in a tone of voice that forewarned of impeding violence. Not waiting for an answer, the veteran walked rapidly to the station where Bowman sat and parked himself at the man's shoulder, hands clasped behind his back in an attempt to keep himself from lashing out physically at the techhead. Bowman had demonstrated to be the most competent and reliable of his subordinates to date on this mission; harming him would only insure that Shraeder himself didn't see the outside of the SeaQuest alive again.

(Rivolta Silenziosa - Humanwine)

Said IT engineer was having a conniption. The numbers on screen couldn't be real! "Colonel! Some half-wit spawn of a whore just opened up the water intakes in the maglev tunnel! Were sinking straight down like an elevator cab! Down to 4,300 feet and lowering! Were going at about 100 feet every 15 seconds but it'll get faster as our weight increases! We have to do something or we'll all drown!"

Shraeder turned to his favorite minion on the team, who was also the only woman under his command right now. She was his favorite because she was the silent type and never put her ego on the table when doing a job, unlike the men who all thought and decided by the feel of their balls.

"Connors! Close the clamshell doors and lock them down! Put the bridge on DSV protocols now!" Turning towards the two surviving bridge crew, Shraeder asked them "How do we secure this pipe?" as he gestured to the Aqua-Tube that throned in place of glory in the middle of the bridge deck.

Ford nudged Hitchcock with an elbow and she cleared her throat noisily to obtain the man's attention. She got it fast, and more than she cared for. At least he wasn't interested just in her boobs like the three male mercs who hadn't stopped ogling her chest since they took over the room.

"Colonel. The pipe cover controls are on the face of the tube, right in front of the captain's chair. The lever closes the cover and the numeric pad controls the lock and subsystems such as lights and back-up public-address speakers built into the Aqua-Tube network. Punch in code ## 2004-12-24 ## LWOL SQSEC and that will lock down everything in that segment of the pipes."

Shraeder stared at the female lieutenant-commander with obvious distrust but complied with the suggestion. He pulled the lever and was gratified to see the clear thick synthetic crystal cover slide over the opened mini moonpool, establishing an airtight seal. He entered the code on the small numeric pad next to it and pressed enter. The entire Aqua-Tube went dark as all systems inside went off-line but didn't seem to do anything else.

Exhaling a relieved breath, the colonel stood straighter, savoring his small victory over adversity as he visually surveyed the situation on the bridge. He still had his Ex-O and three minions plus Bowman at hand's reach. The rest of the ship was now in serious jeopardy as things were bound to get hectic when the SQ survivors and his remaining mercs would see the water flowing from the doors of the maglev shaft.

"Colonel, we have a situation here. Were stabilizing at 6,000 feet under the waves and the Bush carrier group is still above our heads, shadowing us as the hull siphon tests required." Lance Bowman called out from his station. "However, the safety depth for the shuttles we have on hand is 5,000 feet if the hulls are armored. At 4,000 feet our stolen university shuttle was already red-lining it. Now, we can't even use the MR-class boats to leave. We have to find a way to purge the extra weight or nobody's leaving this tub."

The old marine wiped his forehead and asked Ford "Was this part of any contingency plans you had established as a matter of policy in case of invasion or mutiny?"

The black skinned male shook his head dubiously and spoke in low, painful tones to avoid aggravating the bruising on the side of his face. He was pretty sure that the merc who hit him had broken his jaw and cracked a few teeth, quite intentionally at that. Maybe Ford shouldn'a shot dead one of their guys when they opened the doors? "Wazzna us. Dunno who. Can your guy look in shaft to see?" he spelled out slowly as his jaw hurt with each movement.

Shraeder turned towards his IT man and asked out loud for a sit-rep in the maglev shaft using the cameras. He got a shake of the head in the negative. "The cameras are all off-line, both regular and emergency circuits. It looks to have been done manually at the local boxes. When I try to access them, the system says the programs are running fine but there's no peripherals at the ends of the wires to send us a signal. And it's like that only at the end of the pipe in the maintenance parking slot of the carriage. We have visual and sound in the rest of the pipe all the way to the stop near the bridge."

"So it wasn't a hack that blinded us, they took out the listening posts manually. Not Wolenczak, then, he would have hacked the systems and played them on a loop to show us an empty tunnel no matter what happened in it. This was somebody else from the SQ people we haven't captured yet. Show me the remaining people on the main monitor."

The fallen marine looked at the large view-screen at the front of the bridge deck and frowned as he saw the faces lined up on two rows of seven pictures, some lined in green (captured) or red (at large). The two most worrisome were of course the little teenaged runt Wolenczak and the fat pig Crocker. From the five others still roaming free, it was either that female engineer that had escaped from the engine room, ensign Burgess, or the second man from the security department, seaman 1st class Landry. The quartermaster Benjamin Krieg was a glorified paper pusher and the medics were no-brainers as well as no-starters. The male corpsman Yagher Iggs was a boosted ambulance jockey that went into the military to escape an abusive family as soon as he hit recruitment age at 18. The female field medic Ensign Cy'Bella DiNavarro was small, about 130 pounds all dressed up and devoid of history towards aggressivity or trouble.

His money would be on Crocker or Landry, maybe even Krieg. Looking at the pictures of the massive levers and circular valve controls that operate the water intakes he knew it would take an adult of sizable body mass and strength to operate. That took out the kid, women and young corpsman as too small and physically weak to operate the mechanism.

"Boss!" the mercenary corporal called out in a panic "The guys in the mess hall are being attacked by a monster! It has six legs and no head or ass they can make out!"

Before the flabbergasted colonel could comprehend that particular statement, the captive female officer spoke. "It's the hyper-reality probe. Somebody's got control of the HR probe and brought it inside the ship to use as a war-drone. Three guesses who's responsible for that small piece of ugliness mucking up your carefully laid plans and the first two tries don't count." she finished with a bitchy smirk.

Shraeder and Bowman grunted at the same time "Wolenczak" and the other mercs all shared a weird look. Their boss always got strange when the kid's name came up.

Corporal Hanson decided to clear up a few things and ask out loud "What about the kid, Boss? He's 16 years old just barely and doesn't have any training at all in weapons or combat. How can he be so much pain in our ass?"

The veteran soldier actually laughed out an angry, despondent sounding outburst that had no mirth at all. "Let me tell you Hanson, it's not what his file says that'll kill us all today. It's the verses and chapters the Pentawhores blacked out in what was left after the NSA Ghost-Ops managers redacted most of his file by ripping out whole pages. Whatever the SeaQuest crew think they know about him is nothing but lies and fabrications and even they aren't all that safe right now. I guess it depends on how they treated the kid while he was in their care. We'll see soon enough."

Corporal Hanson exclaimed full of doubts "Just what is this guy, that he has you pissing yourself just by saying his name out loud? I know Bowman's a sissified fool but you, Boss?"

(Never Back Down – Two Steps From Hell)

A voice came from the loudspeakers all around the bridge deck, filling the air with words as poignantly toxic as any bioweapon ever let loose during a war. "I am the Owner and Operator of the SeaQuest. She is my private property and plaything. Just as are the bodies and souls aboard her baneful hull. And you, Claude Hanson, mongrel spawn of a cur and his bitch, are nothing before my eye and judgment. You will survive this day that you may rue it and all those that follow as I ply my art and science in the pursuit of depraved experiences and knowledge most foul. Know that your Destroyer is come."

The scornful voice fell silent; the dull click at the end signifying the comm-line had been turned off. Every mercenary in the room looked at each other while the two SQ officers huddled closer together in the crook of the joint between the Aqua-Tube and the elevated platform at the rear of the bridge. While they had both thought of Lucas as a slightly standoffish, aloof and lonesome boy, neither had actually thought him capable of outright violence. Sure, they both knew about the whispers around ship and the weird looks Crocker exchanged with Bridger anytime the subject was talked about near them, but still...

And now Shraeder and Bowman seemed genuinely scared, and this voice from the ceiling that was clearly Lucas speaking out... WTF?

(The Origin of Species – Audio Machine)

There was a sudden explosion of synthetic crystal shards and twisted pieces of steel-alloy framing followed by gushing sea water as the entirety of the Aqua-Tube wellhead exploded outwards, splashing the forward part of the bridge in shrapnel and salty wetness. A whirring, hissing bluish contraption of metal, plastic and malice had entered the fray and fallen upon them mercilessly. Standing twelve feet tall by four feet wide, equipped with eight lower clawed legs and innumerable arms and whips, the torso pivoted and positioned outwards and downwards eight of its upper arms, opening the claws and extending the chain-sabers mounted on all the forearms. Four circles of twelve small blue LED lights running all around the thing's dumbbell shaped body lit up and emitted little blue beams as they scanned all over the room and acquired targets to process. Then more spikes, blades and fully animated barbed tentacular limbs extended outwards as the whole machinery began to spin like a demented break-dancer.

The crazed voice of Lucas Edward Daniel Yitzhak Holt Wolenczak was heard to let out a maniac laughter of pure unfettered evil through the speakers around the entire ship and the surrounding waters for a mile outwards, drowning out the people's shouts and pleas for mercy in its anger-fueled craze. The HR probe's bigger and nastier cousin, Lucas's own secret creation and ace-in-the-hole, The Engine-of-Pain, was let loose to destroy and defile the invaders so that they may know once and for all the final Truth.

Lucas will never kneel, bow or submit to anyone.

Lucas will be free, safe and whole, whatever the cost.

Unfortunately for the mercenaries and some of the SeaQuest's less reputable crew, the Guardian Beast had awakened and It hungered for tainted blood and diseased souls. It would feed well upon the unworthy this day.

(Ad Mortem - Adrian Von Ziegler)