[Story] Nemo

High tech intrigue and Cold War
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Artemis
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[Story] Nemo

Post by Artemis »

Not sure how to work this back in, but I'd really like to expand a bit on the fringe-y side of CSW. You know, the Incredible Tales stuff we had pre-crash: giant ants, the frickin' Nautilus and captain Nemo, the Washington D.C. street grid being based on some mystical pattern, Avalon and RAF pilots whose planes have suffered catastrophic electrical failures over the ocean being guided back to shore by the ghosts of dead pilots from the Battle of Britain. That sort of thing.
Now installing Fringe Module.

Nemo

Some of the color was starting to come back into his cheeks, his mother noticed. That was good. When they had first taken him out of the lake, his skin had been blue, only slightly lighter than that of his eyes, which had been dull and lifeless. That meant he was getting better, she hoped. Still, no matter how much hot water she sponged down his back, it was like touching chilled metal.

“Oh, son,” she said, squeezing more hot water from the tub onto his head. “Why did you do that? You know water that deep is dangerous in the winter.”

The boy stayed quiet, and his mother was sure he wouldn’t answer. He might still be in shock. He might not even hear her.

But he could, and he did answer. “I was trying to escape.”

“You could have died!” She threw the sponge in the tub, and moved to face her son. Tears moved down her cheeks.

Her son looked up. His skin was healthier now, and that made his eyes stand out like they always did. Those eyes...they were nothing like hers, or her husband’s. Not like anyone’s, as far as she knew. “I was just trying to escape,” he repeated. He bowed his head, and picked up the sponge, and squeezed water over his head.


***


The room might have been the conning tower of a submarine. It might have been a mad genius’s laboratory. It might have been a drawing room or library. It was, in fact, all three. The brass, bronze, and wood paneling gave it an air of comforting humanity, or at least it would have if the situation the young soldier found himself in were not so terrifying. The strange contraptions and components in the room might have fascinated him; The the display screens, metallic railing, and the sounds of distinctively military machinery might have seemed familiar and comforting. They were not.

The man in the middle of the room was huge, easily seven feet tall and with more than enough bulk to fill his frame. His hair and beard were cropped short, but there was an air of wildness to the hair. It was more fur than hair, an animal’s adornment. He was the only man in the room besides the young soldier, watching the screens, making adjustments to one of the submarine’s control surfaces. Occasionally glancing at him, as if deciding what to do with him.

“There’s no reason to do this,” the soldier said. He was nineteen years old, only four weeks out of basic training. He had no beard, only freckles, and he was still in the olive drab off-duty tank top and pants he’d been in when the transport ship had been sunk yesterday, and he’d awakened on this ship. The helmet he had hastily grabbed as he felt the horrible sensation of the ship going down was gone, though. Now, he watched on the screen as another transport, an almost identical copy save for the three designation numbers on the side of the ship’s hull, came into view. Words and numbers scrolled down both sides of the screen, and the soldier recognized them as range-finding and tracking algorithms. Another screen showed schematics of what he was sure were torpedoes. One was highlighted in red.

“There’s more reason than what you were going to do if you and your comrades had made it across the Gulf,” the man (the Captain?) said, calmly. He said, in a more authoritative voice, “blow ballasts, rise to optimal firing depth.”

The soldier felt like he was on an elevator going up. There was no one else on the ship, yet it was doing as its Captain commanded it. He had never seen anything like that before, and had been sure nothing like that existed outside of science fiction. “The people on that ship are going to die!”

“You continue to draw parallels between my actions and their outcomes, knowing somewhere in the back of your indoctrinated mind that the boys on that ship will die when they get where they think they’re going anyway.”

“You don’t know that!”

“You are going to war, your country. People die in war. That’s just what happens.”

“So what does it matter if you do or don’t kill them right now?”

The Captain smiled. “What does it matter, indeed?”

***


He was lost. Good. If he was off-course, they would not find him if they came looking for him.

It wasn’t exactly death he was seeking, though he was sure he’d find it. It was isolation from the world, or rather, immersion in a new one. Immersion, he thought, amused, in a most literal way.

The tiny boat, which had no business this far out to sea, rocked as waves pushed against it. He held onto the edge, not wanting to be tossed in. When he went, he wanted it to be of his own will. Ironic, he thought, when he was going to be giving himself up to a much greater will, one way or the other. Either God or the Sea would have him in just a moment.

He stripped off his shirt, took off his shoes. He put a hand on the clasp of the necklace his wife had given him as a wedding gift, but took his hand away after a moment. The necklace was of a silver dolphin. It was appropriate that he should wear it.

The young man looked down at the ocean. Everyone thought that the ocean was blue, a reflection of the sky above. But he knew that was only the part people cared to see. Under the blue was black. It was that black he intended to find.

He turned the boat back to the coast, and started the engine back up. It began to move. If the boat was lost as well, people would assume he’d died in an accident, or simply gotten lost and died of starvation and exposure. If the boat came back and he didn’t, though, it would force people to think about what had happened.

He jumped in the ocean, as the boat sputtered back to the still-visible coast. He barely made a splash, and the waves left no ripples in the water.


***


“Tell me,” the Captain asked, looking down at the soldier. “Why do you fight?”

The soldier was still bound at the hands and feet, but the Captain had moved him to a chair that the soldier was sure hadn’t been there a moment before. It was not comfortable, but it was better than the hardwood floor. “Because there are people in that country who are dangerous.”

“Ah. So you fight to protect yourselves and your loved ones? Or to avenge them?”

“Well, no. But the leaders of that country have threatened to attack our allies, and said they hate us.”

“Allies. Not loved ones, though?”

“I... No, I wouldn’t really call them that.”

“And why do they hate you?”

“I don’t know. Because we live differently from them, I guess.”

“So now you are fighting for culture.”

“No, we’re fighting to prevent death.”

“Oh, and now you fight to preserve life. You started out pretty good, but now I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“What?”

“To protect yourself and loved ones are good reasons. I once did so. Fighting for culture is ironic to the point of absurdity. And you do not just fight, you kill, because that is the only way to fight at this scale. And tell me, does killing to preserve life make any sense to you?”

“But they could kill others! We have to do something!”

“One way or another, someone dies. Animals kill. Humans should find a better way.”

There was a sound of alert from one of the stations, and the Captain looked away from the soldier to address it.

“And what are you doing? You’re going to kill dozens of soldiers!”

“I’m killing to preserve life, just like you,” the Captain said. “How can you show outrage at your own mimic?”

***


The hallways, catwalks, and rooms of the great ship were like nothing the man could have imagined. He had seen pictures of the inside of submarines, fascinated with the machines since childhood. This looked nothing like those pictures at all.

“She has changed many times, the Nautilus” the Captain said. “The earliest sketches and schematics I could find in the vault look something like a Sperm Whale, with her only weapon a battering ram. When the Frenchman wrote about her, she resembled a cigar with conical ends. At the dawn of the 20th century, it had grown a conning tower and torpedo tubes. Just before I took Captaincy, her heart heaved itself up and out of its shell, becoming a nuclear reactor. Now, the torpedoes have become capable of super-cavitation, and very soon now, I think the whole ship will be able to, as well.”

The man’s head would not stop turning. In the two weeks since he had awakened on the ship, there had simply been far too much to take in - the library, the Captain’s quarters, the strange infirmary that he had realized had been operating on him by itself, healing him after his near-death in the crushing ocean, all of it was worth examining, but there had been no time for that.\r\n\r\n“How does it do that? Work by itself, change, evolve?”

“Like all organisms, she adapts to survive,” the Captain said.

“But, it’s a machine.”

The Captain, normally very jovial and expansive from what the man had seen of him, suddenly became very serious. “The Nautilus is not a machine, my boy. She is a concept. A dream. An escape. It has been an escape for dozens of men like you and I - A legendary pirate, trying to cut the strangling tentacles of the East India Company. A Polish nobleman, fleeing the oppression of his people by the Tsars. An Indian seeking revenge on the English for their injustices in his homeland. A Kriegsmarine officer disgusted by the machinations of his country and its leaders.”

“And you?” the man asked his savior and his captor. “Who are you?”

The Captain looked the man in the eyes, and replied quietly. “No one. We are all no one.”


***


“Convince me,” the Captain said to the soldier. “If you can prove to me that what I am about to do is more wrong than what will happen if I do not, then I will let this go. I will return my ship to the open sea.”

“How could I possibly do that?” the soldier said, struggling against his bonds. They were not rope, and he could swear he could feel them moving by themselves, fighting him as he tried to pull his wrists and ankles out. “You can’t reason with a crazy person.”

“So far,” the Captain said, “you aren’t doing so well.”

There was a sound like metal grinding underwater, which then resolved into something combining whale’s song and a human’s scream. The sound splintered into individual notes and tones, and the tone became words. “Torpedoes armed. Firing range in twenty minutes,” the voice of an angry god said.

“You have twenty minutes,” the Captain said, inspecting a gold pocket-watch in his hand. He sat down in another chair, which the soldier was certain had not been there before. “Take your time. I am a patient man.”

There was a long pause, as the soldier considered his argument. “You want to prevent the deaths of soldiers and civilians, right?”

“Yes, though unlike you, I make no distinction.”

“Well, these people we are fighting, they want to go to war one way or the other. And they’ll be murdering people in the streets, over religion. We want to prevent that.”

“By destroying this nation?”

“If we have to, yes.”

“As you destroyed the last two oppressive nations you fought with? In doing so, causing the deaths of millions.”

“We tried to stop that! That’s why we were in there in the first place!”

“But it did happen. There is always a better way. There has to be.”

“But you’re doing the same thing! You’re killing the people you should be helping!”

The Captain shook his head. “There is no reason I should help you. I align with no nation drawn on a map, and no man with a name.”

***


The old Captain was dying. When the man had come aboard the Nautilus, the Captain had seemed in the peak of health, a primeval force bound in corpus. Only months later, his skin was covered in liver-spots, and his once thick black hair had thinned and turned gray. His eyes still shone with amber light (so strange a color, not unlike the man’s own blue eyes), but everything else about him seemed dull and faded.

“Do not be sad for me,” the Captain said. He smiled, revealing teeth that were much lonelier than they had been two weeks ago, when he had fallen ill.

“What’s happening to you?” the man asked, amazed to find himself sadder for the Captain than for any being he had ever known before.

“The sea is merciful,” the Captain said. “It allows nothing to live past its prime, to grow old, to question its purpose or existence. We die at our peak, and never know the pain of descent.”

“But there’s so much more you could do,” the man said. “And what will happen to the Nautilus? I... I can feel her slowing down. Grinding and lurching. She’s connected to you, isn’t she?”

“In a way - if there is no Captain, there can be no ship.” He looked at the man, and smiled. “And so I give her to you.”

Sorrow and grieving were intruded upon by shock. “But... You just picked me up. You said you would take me back to land.”

“Is that what you really want? I don’t think you fell overboard, in fact I know you didn’t. My friend, I know you very well. And so does the Nautilus. When she returned you to life, she tasted your blood. She approved. Salty and thick, blood that reminded her of the brine that surrounds us. She knows you are to be her new Captain. And so, she is letting me die. For a ship cannot have two Captains.” He coughed, and spat out black blood.

The man cleaned the tar-like fluid off the Captain’s chest. “But I have so much to learn from you. I don’t know how to control the ship-”

“She will teach you.”

“I don’t know what I should do. How can I change things on the surface when I must remain away from it?”

“You will also remain free of its influences, its diseases, its lies. Must the surgeon dive into the body to cure it? Of course not. He needs only his will, his genius and his scalpel. You already have the will and genius, my boy - now I give you the scalpel, a glorious cutting tool that will never rust or bend as long as you hold her in your hand.”

The man thought for a long time. He finally said. “I accept.” Then, “where should I bury you?”

“Do not,” the Captain said. “Torpedo tube 7 has a special flood door, too small to fire a torpedo from, but just large enough to fit a man through. Fire me from it - let the sharks have the biggest pieces, and everything else the smaller pieces.”

“I will miss you,” the man said.

“No, you will not,” the Captain said, and closed his eyes for the last time.

The man put the dead Captain in the flood door, and went back to the conning tower. A screen was already showing him torpedo tube 7. He needed give no order. The ship knew. She showed him the outer carapace, and he watched as the dead man floated out of the tube with a host of bubbles, in place perhaps of funerary roses. He drifted away like a miscarried birth, and disappeared into blackness, the true color of the sea.

The new Captain sat in his chair, and told his ship to surface to snorkel depth. He would need plenty of fresh air - his renewed crusade would begin soon.


***


“You never answered me,” the soldier said, trying a new tactic. “Those men are going to die one way or another, and if we don’t go to war, the people in that country will go to war for us. So what does it matter if they die now, by your hand, than the way they would have if you hadn’t intervened?”

The Captain smiled, and for a moment the soldier thought it was a malevolent grin, the rictus of a madman. But it was not quite so bad as that - it was a patronizing smile of approval. “A good question. I assure you, there is a reason.”

“Care to enlighten me?”

“This ship carries technology that no nation on the surface has access to. Neither your country nor the one you go to war with are idiots when it comes to technology - you’re geniuses when it comes to cogs and circuits and cells. That transport ship will not just sink by accident, and it will not just be sunk by the submarines of your enemy. No. I will kill with the newest and strangest implements, and both sides will be forced to realize it. Soon after, I shall destroy a surface-to-air missile site belonging to your enemy, using missiles with the greatest accuracy, armed with a warhead never conceived of on the surface. Both sides will be forced to recognize that an outside, and as far as they know, superior force, stands in the way of their warmongering.”

“But you’re only one ship!”

“They do not know that. All they will know is someone in this Gulf has super-cavitating torpedoes, which no country should have for another decade. And they will know that someone has a missile that produces an explosion limited in blast radius, but within that radius will be nothing more than red earth. They will know that someone watches them, and disapproves. They will know that someone is judging them. And when they exclaim, in their surety, that no one could do these things, then they will be right.”

“What if they find you? They’ll hunt you down, and destroy you, and the what will you have accomplished?”

“I will have postponed the deaths of others, and I will have shaken the resolve of warmongers and oppressors.”

“You’re so sure of yourself. What if both sides just assume the other one has a secret weapon that they’re using. That’s far more believable than you are.”

“But your enemies will know that they didn’t attack your ship, and you will know that you didn’t attack the fuel station.”

The soldier looked away. It was impossible, he couldn’t reason with this man. He was a fanatic, a megalomaniac, a sadist. The best he could do was insult him, and that would just make him feel empty. He did it anyway. “You can’t be God.”

“God?” The Captain asked, raising his eyebrows. For a moment, the soldier thought that the Captain would fly into a rage and kill him where he sat - he was insane, after all. He did not. He just sighed, and continued. “Man has become God without even realizing it.”

***


The ship attended him like a devoted spouse, like no friend he had ever had on the surface. The sea enveloped him in caring arms, where it threatened to crush the inhabitants of other submarine craft. Together, they gave him food, shelter, and companionship. Together, they became his home.

And like all homes, it had to be defended from time to time.

It was not long before the new Captain realized that the Nautilus and his own existence was not entirely unknown to the surface world. Centuries had gone by, and in that time the ship and her many Captains had committed all manner of what most would call atrocities. And of course, the Frenchman - the Captain had taken up the habit of his predecessor of calling the writer of
Vingt Milles Lieues Sous les Mers only by his nationality - had exposed his existence to the world in a fictional format. Between the two, there was enough evidence to convince some of his presence beneath the waves, and many had set out to destroy him.

Somehow, the Nautilus knew that the name of the submarine it was dueling with was named the USS St. Louis. Perhaps they had dueled before - the Captain did not know. The Nautilus also knew that the St. Louis was a slightly modified Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine, a hunter-killer, designed to locate, track, intercept, and destroy enemy submarines or ships. The St. Louis was faster, thicker-skinned, and could hear better than anything the United States Navy, or their rivals in the Soviet Navy, admitted to possessing. It could only be assumed that her weapons were equally advanced.

Always, human technology improved faster than nature could ever dream of. The Nautilus had always survived by evolving first, but humanity was catching up with the enemy most of them didn’t even know they had. The Captain knew that this battle would be different from all the others the ship had ever fought. His hands gripped the conn, fingers curling around the familiar wheel that controlled the ship’s movement. He said aloud “ready torpedoes and countermeasures. Stay on passive sonar sweep.” The St. Louis might not have heard them yet, and if he could keep it that way by keeping the Nautilus’ sonar as quiet as possible, they might be able to sneak up on his pursuer.

There would be no running, this time. He knew his ship, and he knew his enemy, and he was ready to fight.

The beasts circled one another, listening for any hint of the others presence. Finally the St. Louis seemed to pick up a trace of her target, and two torpedoes cut through the water between the two ships.

“Countermeasures!” the Captain yelled, and his ship obeyed almost before he’d finished speaking. Tiny water-jets detached from the Nautilus’ skin, running for the surface and screeching the whole way. The sensitive electronic ears of the St. Louis’s torpedoes were nearly deafened by the countermeasures, and turned up to follow them.

“Switch to active sonar,” he ordered the ship, seeing no reason to continue hiding if they could already see him. “Give me visual.”

A set of goggles dropped from the ceiling, placed themselves in front of his eyes, and six spidery appendages wrapped around the back of his head, holding his eyes tight to the goggles. He saw the sonar display, made a few mental calculations, and turned the control surfaces to face the massive shape that could only be his hunter. “Flood tubes one and three,” he said aloud. After the three second that he knew was all it would take, he continued “trigger super-cavitation, and fire.”

Around the torpedoes in the flooded tubes, trillions of tiny air bubbles seemed to leak from the metal skins of the weapons. The bubbles congealed together into a shell of air, forcing the syrupy density of water away, making the otherwise cumbersome shapes of the torpedoes faster and, by association, deadlier.

They sprang from their tubes like greyhounds out of the gate, twisting in and out of each others path, making no effort to conceal their presence. No, not greyhounds - there was purpose in this race. They were wolves, hungry, mad, and not to be deterred.

The USS St. Louis was the most advanced ship in the United States Navy, possibly the most advanced of man’s constructs that swam beneath the waves. Yet for all that, it could not stand against an inch’s thickness of bubbles and two tactical nuclear warheads.


***


“What do you mean?” the young soldier asked. “How have we become God?”

“The skies blacken at our command,” the Captain said. “The earth can hide no secret from us. We see into the very fabric of the universe, and it trembles under our sight, knowing if we wanted to, we could rend it to pieces.”

“But we don’t,” the soldier said. “There hasn’t been a nuclear detonation during wartime in over sixty years. We almost did in Cuba, but that didn’t happen - we talked it out. We can reason with one another, and we’ve proven it.”

The Captain raised an eyebrow, and nodded. “Yes, you have. You have proven that redemption is possible. But we have not redeemed ourselves yet.”

“Why don’t you go public?” the soldier asked. “Broadcast your message, talk to the people instead of blowing them up! All you’re doing is spreading fear, and that is what makes people fight in the first place.”

“Ah, but fear is also what keeps us in line, what keeps us humble,” the Captain said. “Once, perhaps, mankind feared God, but as we have already discussed, we have little to fear from an equal, now. Humanity must have something else to fear - something they cannot understand or defeat.”

“But you can only go so far in this ship of yours,” the soldier said. “So a few transports and SAM sites get blown up, that isn’t going to stop a war! There’s got to be another way to do that.”

“Oh?” The Captain asked. “Strange words, coming from a soldier.”

He looked away, surprised that the Captain was right. “I... I meant...”

“The soldier isn’t supposed to think, is that it? As far as everyone else, including your superiors, are concerned, the soldier needs only to fight, die, and kill.” The Captain looked into the soldier’s face. “I propose to change the deal,” he said. “To make it easier on you. If you can tell me one thing that is worth killing for, I will let you go, and let your people have their war. I will watch impassively, killing only if attacked, as any creature of the sea would do.”

“Worth killing for?”

“Yes. It is honorable to fight for something, it is noble to die for something. But what in the world, in all of Creation, is worth killing for? Answer me this, and our time together will be at an end. But answer truthfully - if you lie, you will have to watch as your friends perish.”

Following this, the whale-scream voice spoke again. “Optimal firing range reached. Torpedoes armed, tubes flooded. Awaiting command.”

The soldier looked down, thinking frantically. This was it, this was his ticket out, this could be what prevented the deaths of dozens of his friends and comrades. All he had to do was answer the question.

But he couldn’t think of an answer.

***


The Captain stood on the hull of the Nautilus, feeling the rare Gulf rain pelt his skin, listening to the tinkling sounds it made on the ship’s hull, a marriage of squid’s carapace and advanced composite material. He watched as the sea sloshed back and forth in the squall, dispersing the cinders-and-ashes remains of the American troop transport. Here and there, bodies floated, but most of them had already sunk to the depths. What few remained were being examined and, in most cases, deemed worthy by tiger sharks.

This observation was a rare occurrence - normally, the Captain preferred to stay beneath the waves. The Nautilus desalinated water and attracted fish for him to subsist off of, and he needed to snorkel only every few months - there was little reason for him to rise to the surface. He realized that the reason his face hurt so much in the rain and the wind was because it had become accustomed to existing without them.

He didn’t know why he had risen any more than marine biologists know why sharks leap out of the water, loosing a short roar before disappearing again beneath the waters. It was not to admire his handiwork - he took no pride in his war-making, his unseen revolution. It was a task, a role; one he enjoyed, but with the simple joy of a mechanic or teacher. Yet, here he was, watching the waves, the wreckage, the sharks, and the bodies.

He focused on a body barely an arm’s length from the Nautilus’ hull. A shark was nudging it, almost tenderly, deceptively so. The Captain knew it would soon open wide it’s maw, and tear off a side of torso or an entire limb - tasting it, to see if it was worth eating. Of course it would be - anything is worth eating to a shark.

The body’s hand moved - not with the motion of the sea, but on its own. A weak movement, but movement nonetheless. And the eyes were opening, squeezing shut again as raindrops splashed into them, the mouth twitching...

The shark noticed this, too. The Captain watched, disconnected, waiting for the fatal bite.

But that did not happen. The shark nudged the man once again, and then swam away. Its black eyes showed no thought, but it nonetheless seemed to say to itself Not this one. Someone else, but not this one. And then it dove.

“Interesting,” the Captain said. “Very interesting.”

Stepping carefully to the side of the ship, the Captain extended a hand. He could not reach the floating soldier, but the ship saw his motion, and the sea boiled up the arms of an octopus, wrapping the body up and pulling it out of the water.

The soldier began to awaken fully. When he realized what was happening, he began to struggle, out of both fear and confusion. It was no use - the thick cables held him tight, lest he struggle his way back into the sea, which would surely kill him.

The cables handed the soldier to their Captain, who put him in a fireman’s hold over his shoulder. The soldier’s helmet slid off, clanging on the hull, and falling back into the sea. Before it had filled with rainwater and sunk, the Captain and his guest had entered through a pressure hatch leading to the Nautilus’ conning tower.

Its Captain aboard, the great ship dove once more, disappearing from radar, satellite imagery, and human sight.


***


The soldier looked up, and there were tears in his eyes.

“Do you have an answer for me?” the Captain asked.

“No,” the soldier said.

“You cannot think of any single thing worth killing for? Not home, not your loved ones, not your very life?”

The soldier shook his head. “Someone dies every time.”

“Well yes,” the Captain said. “That is usually what happens when you kill a man.”

The soldier did not answer. His face was one of defeat. He was a dead man, and so were all the people on that ship. He wished he knew the name, and the names of those on board - he wished he could ask their forgiveness.

The Captain turned to his control surfaces and screen. He cleared his throat, preparing to give the order. The soldier squeezed his eyes shut, and asked for forgiveness anyway.

“Close tubes,” the Captain said.

“What?” the soldier asked, looking up in surprise.

“Dive to cruising depth, and make for the Indian Ocean, half speed,” the order continued. The Captain turned back to face the soldier, and he was smiling. Not a mocking smile, or a patronizing one. It was... Joyful. Boyish, almost. “You are right,” the Captain said. “There is indeed nothing worth killing for - not even the life of others. Animals kill - humans should find a better way.”

“But... That was a test?” the soldier asked, indignant. “But what about all the people you’ve killed! What was all that for? You honestly expect me to believe you’ve just had a change of heart?”

“Believe what you want,” the Captain said. “Even the sea has a sense of mercy. It spared you. There will be other days, where I will forget your answer, and on those days I shall kill. But... Reason does sometimes prevail.”

“What, based on your mood?” Having been spared death and guilt, the soldier replaced these with anger and confusion. “The changing of the tides, or some metaphorical bullshit like that?”

The Captain was still smiling. “Yes. Like that.”

The soldier opened and closed his mouth once, twice. He finally sighed, a sound of relief and exhaustion. “So, you will take me home, then?”

“Where’s home?”

“Annapolis. Can you get me there?”

“Or somewhere close. You may go.” As he said this, the bonds on the soldier’s hands loosened, and fell with wet sounds to the deck. As the soldier examined his wrists and ankles, he saw there were tiny sucker marks all along them. “But you must make me a promise.”

“There’s a catch?” the soldier said, looking back up.

“You must promise not to tell of me. But you shall tell of what we talked about.”

“How will you know if I keep my end of the bargain?”

“I will know. The sewers in your city will listen to you, and they will tell the rivers you feed them into, and the rivers will tell the deltas, and the deltas shall tell the seas, and the seas shall tell me. I will know.” He pointed to the ship’s aft. “There is a washroom down the hall. You need to use it.”

The soldier walked off, rubbing his wrists, glancing over his shoulder at the Captain. As he went through and then closed the pressure hatch, the Captain watched him. “Very interesting, indeed,” he said.

Perhaps they would travel to the American coast, and the Nautilus would birth a small child for him to travel to shore with. Perhaps he would try and change things while on the surface. The Captain did not envy the soldier if this was the case.

But perhaps...

The sea had already shown the young soldier favor once by sparing his life. Perhaps it would do so again. It would be a long cruise back, down the Horn of Africa, and across the expanse of the Atlantic. Minds could change in that time.

“He never did tell me his name,” the Captain mused. “Perhaps he does not have one.” He turned back to the controls, making tiny adjustments and course corrections.

The Nautilus swam past the submarine hills and coral forests, making for the black water of the ocean. Bubbles rose from tiny vents in her hull, clinging and clumping into a single shell of compressed air, covering everything but the tendril-like propeller assembly. Covered in the supercavitation shell, the Nautilus sped away unhindered by friction, and disappeared into the black water.
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Siege
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Re: Nemo

Post by Siege »

Yes! :D

This was always a favourite of mine, not just because of the characterizations and the simple fact that, holy shit, the Nautilus is some kind of living and evolving machine-thing that prowls the seas, but also because of how well such an inherently strange story fits within CSW despite it being for the better part technothriller fare. I love the 'Incredible Tales'-ishness of it, and think we should have more of that!
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Ford Prefect
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Re: Nemo

Post by Ford Prefect »

Siege wrote:This was always a favourite of mine
Word. I've always felt that these elements of the strange and bizarre really helped to set CSW apart from your usual Clancy-esque fare (admittedly that's a little disingenuous to say, but I'm sure you follow my meaning). If you look hard enough, you'll uncover something like this. Something mysterious beneath the notice of the omnipresent secrets and lies that otherwise make-up the setting.
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Re: Nemo

Post by Mobius 1 »

I miss this stuff, if mostly because it was the crazy fringe stuff that originally brought me towards CSW. It was the giant ants and the moon lasers and those THINGS being carted around in boxes in Antarctica. It's the knowledge that, beyond the technothriller conspiracy, there's a Romero Virus, a Lovecraftian Monolith Network, and Giant Kaiju.

I guess it's part of why I like this verse so much - compare it to, COMIX, which is essentially the repostiory of all the random story ideas we have on the board. CSW has a tighter focus, while still simultaneously allowing for wide-angle stuff such as this.
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Re: Nemo

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

This is wonderful. I mean, sure, there are giant ants and aliens and Lovecraftianoids, but Arty - man. This is sublime. I only read excerpts of the original, but man the discourse and the idealogue in this story - how it touches on the politics, very lightly, and then indulges itself on THE SEA and in FANTASTIC ADVENTURE with STRANGE SCIENCE is very awesome. I love the weirdo biotech-ish and evolving mechanically "living" nature of the Nautilus. It's an amazing machine, and man, this guy totally as deep as the deep blue sea. Paradoxical, amoral, but honorable and fantastic and mysterious and stuff, just like THE SEA! I love how you emphasize that aspect. Man.

BTW, this is my first ever time reading this article. I didn't catch it first time round back in old OZ, so this is a real treat. Man. Arty, you sure know how to write this kind of stuff. Your stuff is always so characterful in the prose! The approach is very different and unique, very "you". There's a distinct flavor in this work, as in all your wonderful stuff. :mrgreen:

What differentiates this from all the other kaiju monolithic lovecraftianoid stuff is the sheer character of it.
Mobius 1 wrote:I guess it's part of why I like this verse so much - compare it to, COMIX, which is essentially the repostiory of all the random story ideas we have on the board. CSW has a tighter focus, while still simultaneously allowing for wide-angle stuff such as this.
That's because CSW is, originally, a collab between Siege and Arty and those two have a long history of being totally tight, and now you've gotten into it as well. That's a total of three guys contributing to CSW. Whereas Comix, on the other hand, has almost everyone in it and is a complete sandbox and at best is a crazy mess - which makes "tighter focus" a bit hard since it's not like we can coordinate with each other's brains 100%. :P

That can change soon, though. :twisted:
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