West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide (22 page)

“You don’t want a
war with us, Mr. Darwin, because you will lose,” said Blue Star. “It would be
best for all concerned if you either turned yourself in or cleared out of town,
because we are closing in on you.”

“No, you’re not, I’m
closing in on you,” said Mr. Darwin.

“Whatever,
seriously, I’m not intimidated by an Italian-American eunuch with delusions of
grandeur,” said Cosmic Kid.

“What are you
talking about?” snapped Mr. Darwin.

“Aha! He’s not a
eunuch or an Italian-American - that narrows down the search considerably!”
said Cosmic Kid triumphantly. Blue Star realized the Kid was right in his
approach; they weren’t going to learn anything substantial here but they could
establish emotional control of the situation, which might cause Mr. Darwin to
slip up.

“Damn it, I’m out
$50, I was certain he was a eunuch, but I still contend he has an overbite –
you can tell by how he slurs his
Ss
,” said Blue Star.

“I don’t know about
an overbite,” said Cosmic Kid reflectively. “I think he might be Canadian,
though. We’ll have to ask Camille to review the recording.”

“I also think he
might have some sort of genital rash by the way he keeps shifting around in his
seat,” said Blue Star.

“A Canadian with an
overbite and a genital rash, that is kind of scary,” said Cosmic Kid.

“Fuck you both! I’m
going to destroy West Pacific Supers! I’m going to ruin and kill all of you and
the two of you assholes are going to beg me for mercy!” yelled Mr. Darwin.

“Really?” asked Blue
Star. “Are you planning to teleconference us to death?”

“It is a leading
cause of death to Canadians with—” started Cosmic Kid when the television
screen went blank. Cosmic Kid sighed, “Mr. Darwin is unhinged.”

“We need to put the
team and our families into protected status.” Blue Star headed over to the
computer running the teleconference. “We need a technical team to analyze this
computer for leads to his location, but I doubt they’ll find anything.”

“Yeah, but he’s
angry which means we hurt him here,” said Cosmic Kid.

“So he’ll either
hunker down for a while or lash out in anger at us.”

“We want the latter,
right?”

“Usually, I would
say yes, but I don’t know,” said Blue Star. His instincts were that Mr. Darwin
was trouble; there was something about the situation that was bothering the back
of his mind. “We need to be on our guard - this might be a tough Season.”

5:41 p.m.,
Saturday, April 13th, 2013

100
Lighthouse Road

West
Pacific, CA

There
was no way around it: the retaining wall had cracked. Seawolf stood barelegged
in her
Waverider
shorty wetsuit and sighed. She had
been putting off this repair for quite some time now, in the futile hope that
the wall would somehow fix itself. Of course, delay had only worsened the
problem. At this point, the entire seawall would have to be replaced, which
would run into the tens of thousands no doubt. She ran her webbed fingers
through the cold water one last time and began the climb up the hill to her
house.

Buying the historic
lighthouse just off the West Pacific harbor and restoring it to its
pre-Invasion condition had been a long-cherished dream. She signed the papers
the first year her salary topped five million, more than half a year’s income
gone with the stroke of a pen. She had felt exhilarated and frightened to spend
that much money all at once. But the drain on her bank account never stopped.
There were major structural problems that had to be addressed immediately, then
the bare necessities of modern life, such as hooking up to the power and water
grids. Her biggest challenge had been raising the causeway that ran the two
hundred feet between the mainland of West Pacific City and the island on which
the lighthouse was built, so that she could reach the island at high tide. The
costs of that had run into the millions, especially after she’d been sued by
that damn historical preservation society. You’d have thought they would have
been pleased by her efforts to restore the property, but once she’d made it
clear that she wasn’t interested in having the public traipse through her living
room, they’d started raising all sorts of legal challenges. She’d even been
forced to seek out sponsorships other than
Waverider
to pay her bills. The team PR people had been thrilled, but she hated having to
film commercials and MC surfing competitions.

The endless
construction postponed her housewarming party for years, until finally Sarah
talked her into holding one. Seawolf shuddered to remember how humiliating it
had been to see her team members struggle to praise the work she’d completed,
even though they were clearly taken aback by all that remained to be done. That
was the last time she had invited anyone here, though in the subsequent decade
the lighthouse really had come along nicely. She couldn’t believe that Starfish
had made that crack at the first team meeting about her ‘leaky lighthouse’.
After all these years, and that was what the team still thought about the
place. People never remembered the good things you did, only the things you did
that failed.

She wiped her feet
on the grass outside the back door and headed up to her studio on the second
floor. Her art was her way to work through the primal urges she could not
explain: the claustrophobia she felt when she was inland too long, the way the
sea called to her sometimes at night, the almost orgasmic relief she felt when
she ran down the hill and dived into the waves. Sometimes she wished she had
someone to share all of this with, but of course no one could truly understand.
Her
mutancy
set her apart from everyone else on the
planet. One of the counselors at the Institute was always going on about how
wonderful it was that they were all unique, but she knew the truth. People
played up how everyone was unique - unique fingerprints, retinas, voice prints,
DNA - only because they were so like everyone else. At the end of the day, it
was commonalities that made life bearable. And for someone who looked like the
love child of a werewolf and a mermaid, as one particularly snarky superazzi
had once written, there was no one else to be like.

Her latest project
was a mixed media sculpture of a faceless woman rising from the ocean. She had
built the skeleton from driftwood, laid over with short pieces of dried algae.
She tried not to think too much about her art, just letting the creative spirit
move through her, but she wondered at the symbolism of the piece. For some
reason, the ocean that the woman was emerging from was composed of trash that
the sea washed up on the rocks down below. A critic would probably ascribe some
environmental message, but like her house, Seawolf kept her art private. She
laid a sun-washed can at the base and headed downstairs to start dinner.

Another advantage to
living alone was that she could eat whatever she wanted without feeling
defensive. Of course, with sushi having become commonplace over the last few
decades, her preference for lightly seasoned undercooked fish wouldn’t raise
many eyebrows today. She opened the window over the sink to let in the salty
evening air and tipped a little olive oil into a skillet. During the Season,
she didn’t have enough time to go fishing herself, but she always tried to get
fresh catch down at the harbor market. Today she had scored a beautiful tuna
and she filleted it with quick, confident cuts of her knife. The oil was
popping now and she flicked the thin pink slices in, inhaling the aroma.

Her food-reverie was
broken by her
HoloBerry’s
ring. She glanced at the
caller ID:
Coast Guard.

“I’m at home, Paul,”
she said as she answered with one hand, using the other to carefully lift the
barely braised slices out of the skillet and arrange them on a waiting plate.

“Great,” said Paul.
“We just got a report of a boat in distress about two clicks from your place.
You can be there a lot faster than… ”

“Send the
coordinates,” she said, before he had a chance to finish. She glanced
regretfully at her meal. It figured that her first day off in weeks would get
interrupted.

“Done,” said Paul.
“Thanks. We’ll be following…”

“I’m on it,” she
said curtly, clicking off the call and plotting the coordinates he had sent.
More like 2.2 kilometers actually, up the coast not far from Industrial Island.
This would at least be a nice diversion from the
Avalon One
case that Annie had assigned her.
God only knew how she was supposed to get anywhere on that investigation when
all she had to go on was a vigilante report of some thug of questionable
character saying that the headquarters of the people who’d stolen the PGZ was
somewhere out at sea. Typical that everyone would assume that just because the
ocean looked flat it was easy to search. As she tried pointing out at
yesterday’s debriefing about the Grand Colonial excitement, the ocean was
three-dimensional, and it was far more likely that any secret base was located
in a submarine installation than sitting obviously above water right off the
coast. Of course, Annie and Blue Star hadn’t cared; as far as they were
concerned, Seawolf was in charge of ocean investigations, and with everyone
else tracking down the villain du jour Mr. Darwin, and dealing with an unexpectedly
large number of minor supercrimes in the city, she was expected to suck it up
and work miracles.

Seawolf used two
claws to lift one of the fillets and swallowed it in one smooth motion.
Delicious, but the rest would have to wait. She locked the door behind her,
slipped her HoloBerry and keys into the waterproof pouch on her utility belt,
and loped down the hill before diving into the cold dark waves below.

The
vessel was a pretty little yachting sloop, 36’ and an inboard engine, probably
a day sailor judging by the name “3x the Charm” scrawled in purple cursive. It
was laying at anchor a couple hundred yards off the coast near a little rocky
island, but Seawolf quickly saw several ominous signs: a stainless steel
handrail bent clean to the deck, a two-foot-long gash in the mainsail, the dark
red stain of blood pooling off the side as if someone had been dragged
overboard. Even from here she could smell the blood: it was less than two hours
old, probably, and mixed with something salty. As she treaded water and
considered whether to approach via the ladder to the swimming platform,
something brushed against her foot. She kicked absentmindedly, but it didn’t go
away - in fact, it moved back more aggressively, grasping onto her ankle. It
felt like algae, but algae with fingers that were trying to pull her under.
Definitely worth investigating. She took a deep breath and dropped down under
the water to take a look around.

The second membrane
closed over her eyes to allow her to see perfectly underwater, even in the
lower light. There was a kelp bed down here, giant bladder kelp from the looks
of it, long blades and gas bladders waving in the ocean current. Kelp forests
like this were not uncommon off the coast; what was uncommon was the mass of
sea plant that had latched onto her ankle. It had no discernible holdfast
anchoring it to the rocky bottom; in fact, it appeared to be wholly mobile. If
that wasn’t strange enough, there was the matter of the three glowing blue
eyestalks that were staring right at her…

In a rush of water,
the kelp creature launched itself at her, wrapping dozens of long grey-green
tendrils around her legs, torso, and head. She lashed out instinctively,
letting her body take care of the fighting while she focused her brain on
figuring out what the hell this was. Some new form of deep sea life, perhaps or
maybe a mutated clump of semi-sentient kelp. Or a fully intelligent mutant
plant person. Her right hand was free now and she used it to unstrap the LED
dive light from her utility belt, deftly flipping it on and thrusting it
towards the bizarre eyestalks. The thing recoiled from the bright light,
withdrew from its attack, and darted swiftly down into the kelp bed.

Seawolf hovered in
the water, trying to figure out where it had gone, but it was perfectly
camouflaged down there. The kelp bed was
Macrocystis
pyrifera
alright - one of the fastest-growing plants on Earth, a type of brown algae
that could reach 150 feet long, with individual growth spurts of up to two feet
a day. She wondered whether the creature’s appearance near the boat in distress
was coincidence - not likely. Still, she needed to check on the boat, figure
out exactly what had happened up there, and help any survivors. She kicked up
towards the surface.

To her surprise, her
lower body was ensnared again - long tendrils had shot out from the kelp bed,
wrapping around her and pulling her down. This was getting annoying. She raked
at the tendrils with her claws, trying to slice through them and break free. As
she did that, something caught her right arm - something thin, rubbery, and
strong as hell. It whipped around her upper arm and then electrocuted itself -
a nifty power she had to admit, as a couple hundred volts surged into her body.
Time to play hard ball.

Seawolf, still shaking
from the electricity and feeling a little numb, rolled into a somersault,
lashing out when she was halfway around and face to face with the second
creature. This one was bizarre, some sort of cross between the first kelp
creature and an electric eel - with ribbon-like appendages that darted around
maliciously. It seemed to be working in tandem with its friend - so definitely
on the sentient side of things she decided. She twisted her left arm around and
clawed at the appendage that was holding her, ignoring the immediate pulse of
electricity. It took a couple of strikes, but she soon raked through it and the
creature pulled back a minute, as if regrouping. Kelp-boy kept its grip on her
lower legs, however, making surfacing impossible.

The air situation
was starting to become concerning. She could hold her breath for over 10
minutes but the lack of fresh oxygen to her muscles would eventually weaken
her. In some ways Seawolf preferred solo fights like this one - no camera crew
or Ops director to insist on witty one-liners or showcase power usage. On the
other hand, if she got into trouble out here, there was no one to send backup.
Of course the Coast Guard would come eventually, but they probably wouldn’t
find her corpse down here in the kelp bed. She wondered how many more were down
here.
Only one way to find
out.

She dived down
towards the original Kelp-boy, following the appendages holding her legs right
down to their source. He wasn’t expecting that, she noted with grim
satisfaction, as the three eyestalks widened in alarm from their hiding place
behind a gas bladder. Eel-thing was close on her tail, but she had been
counting on that. She grabbed Kelp-boy with one hand and used him as a shield
against Eel-thing, who improperly timed his electric discharge and poured a
couple hundred volts into his buddy, who went limp with shock. She pulled from
her last oxygen reserves to fuel an acrobatic attack of claws and teeth against
Eel-thing, guessing correctly that he needed some recharge time between uses of
his electric power. She was merciless; fighting with the abandon of a cornered
wolf, hacking off any appendage she could lay a claw on. A flash of black and
white spots warned her that she was truly running out of oxygen. Thankfully,
her opponents had run out of appendages. She kicked up and out into glorious
air, pulling with her the battered torsos of Kelp-boy and Eel-thing, and
launching them and her onto the deck of the boat with one final burst of
energy.

Given what she’d
just faced in the water, Seawolf wasn’t holding out much hope for the day
sailors. After taking a moment to pull tentacles and various kelp-bits off of
her, she moved quickly below deck, following a trail of bloody water. Food and
flatware was strewn across the galley, and there were signs of struggle
throughout: a picnic lunch on a tray smashed against a wall, puddles of water
on the furniture, a long strand of kelp wound around a cabinet door quivering
ominously. She touched the kelp tenuously and was surprised when it jerked
around her hand - probably some sort of delayed reflex motion, or maybe not…