Ocean: War of Independence

by Brian Herbert

  ***

  Chapter 3

  It was late morning, two days after Gwyneth set up the Golden Gate blockade. A fog had just cleared over the channel. She swam on the western side of the cordon of sea creatures, watching while a huge container ship turned away from the barricade and headed back out to sea. It was guided by a white U.S. Coast Guard cutter—one of the military vessels that had been sent to that side of the formation from a station at the Presidio, and from another on the coast. Additional cutters patrolled the bay on the inside of the floating barricade, having come from the Mare Island station at Vallejo.

  Gwyneth had not made any experiment to see if she could break up part of this barricade, fearing that might confuse the animals so soon after setting up the formation—and the priority was to block the channel, anyway, not to see if she could improve on her powers. In any event, she assumed that the animals would be as stubborn as those in the Hawaiian Islands, and must have already developed their own form of unit cohesion, and resistance against dispersal.

  She knew this blockade was getting a great deal of media attention—as in Hawaii, there were news helicopters flying overhead. So far, the military had made no apparent attempt to break through the floating barricade, but she had seen submarines pass underneath, going in both directions, and wouldn’t be surprised to see large Navy warships make their appearance, from either side. She hoped another bloodbath didn’t occur like the one at the entrance to Pearl Harbor, and recalled that a Navy submarine had been about to fire a torpedo at the marine animals there, until she spearheaded an attack that beached the vessel. She was ready to do that here, as well, if necessary.

  The federal government was refusing to capitulate and disavow the use of violence to clear the cordons in Hawaii, or the new one that cut off San Francisco Bay. The government also continued to demand the surrender of the hybrid Sea Warriors, and had issued felony arrest warrants against all of them. So far, none had been captured with the exception of Chi’ang and Talbot. In addition, associate members—those who had not gone through the hybrid conversion process—were being questioned.

  She met Monique Gatsby in the water off Baker Beach, near the bridge, where they swam just beneath the surface, communicating underwater. The big demonstration on the bridge was over, and the protesters had dispersed voluntarily after one day. But Gwyneth’s cordon of marine animals remained in place across the waterway, continuing to block it.

  “San Francisco is, politically, quite liberal,” the actress pointed out, “so there are many people here who side with our aggressive environmental actions. I’m coordinating another big demonstration tomorrow in downtown San Francisco.”

  “That’s good,” Gwyneth said, undulating her body to swim slowly. “It sounds like you’re accomplishing a lot.”

  “Both demonstrations would have occurred anyway,” Monique admitted, “but Professor Greco and I are adding to the publicity. Last night we were interviewed at a secret location, and it’s going to be on the national news this evening.”

  “Kimo will be glad to hear that. I want you to report to him directly by molecular communication. He’s just given me a new assignment, and I’ll be leaving soon.”

  “Where are you going?” the blonde woman asked.

  “Somewhere on the coast, but he wants to control the publicity on this one himself.”

  She looked intrigued, but not displeased. Gwyneth liked her. Monique had never shown any revulsion at Gwyneth’s lumpy gray, freakish appearance, with her stunted fins and arms. And despite the actress’s great beauty, and the fact that she did not have any overt changes in her appearance, she had changed her thinking, and seemed unafraid of any changes that might lie in store for her.

  Gwyneth turned toward the center of the channel. “Guess I’d better get going. Good luck here….”

  In bed, Preston Ellsworth blinked his eyes and tried to sit up, until he realized that wires were connected to his arms. His head had been bandaged, and he felt a headache coming on, worsening by the moment. Trying to figure out where he was, he looked around desperately, seeing as much as he could while only lifting his head a little. He decided he was in a hospital room.

  Three native women stood just outside his window, their heads bowed. He heard their low, muffled voices as they spoke in unison. When one of them lifted her head and looked at him through the glass, he realized it was Ealani Pohaku, and scowled at her. She said something to her companions, and hurried out of his view.

  Preston heard a beeping from the wall behind him, and moments later the door to the room opened and a dark-skinned nurse rushed in, a small Hawaiian woman.

  “Mr. Ellsworth! You’ve been in a coma for four days. How are you feeling?”

  “Not good. I just saw that witch Ealani Pohaku outside my window.”

  “Oh, she’s not a witch, Mr. Ellsworth! At least, not in the bad sense. She’s been coming here every day and standing vigil outside your room, driving away evil spirits.”

  “Driving them away, or inflicting them on me? How can you tell the difference?”

  “She is a renowned kahuna healer on the island, Mr. Ellsworth. And besides, I have heard what she and her companions say, summoning the blessings of the gods on your behalf.”

  “Why would she do that for me? I am the sworn enemy of her family.”

  “I know of your dispute with the Pohakus, Mr. Ellsworth. Most everyone around Wanaao does, but I assure you, Ealani cares more about people than land. She wants you to recover.”

  Preston was stunned, watched as the nurse checked the instruments that showed his vital signs and other information.

  “I have a headache,” he said.

  She leaned over him, examined his eyes and face. “You look a little pale, but your vitals are good.”

  He grimaced. “I haven’t had a hangover in years, but that’s what my head feels like right now.”

  “At least you’re feeling something,” she said. “That’s a good sign, considering your head injury. The bullet shattered part of your skull and badly bruised the brain tissue. We’ve gotten the swelling to go down, and that’s part of the reason you’re doing better—along with help from the spirit world, of course.”

  “Can you help me sit up?”

  “Not until the doctor gives the okay. I’m sending for him now….”

  When the nurse slipped out, she saw Ealani in the corridor, and smiled. “It is a good day. Mr. Ellsworth just came out of his coma.” The nurse hardly gave Jeff a glance, so he didn’t think she recognized him. That was not a surprise, because the younger Ellsworth had not gone into Wanaao Town much, and had remained at the ranch for the most part, or on the other side of the island.

  After the woman hurried away, Jeff and Ealani entered the room. He didn’t say anything, met his grandfather’s startled gaze, and hurried over to him. They hugged for a long time, and finally the old man said, “You need to turn yourself in to the police.”

  Tears ran down their faces.

  “I can’t do that, Grandfather. I’m sorry.”

  Jeff and Ealani left the room just as the nurse returned, accompanied by the tall, dark-skinned Dr. Taj Chandrapur, her grandfather’s personal physician.

  After swimming underwater to elude detection, Gwyneth surfaced off Point San Pedro and swam south along the California coast, undulating her oddly-shaped body to gain speed. She carried the young recruit J.D. Watts on her wide back, whose expertise with bubblefish would prove useful on the next phase of the mission. Along the way, whales, whale sharks, and other large creatures joined her, trailing behind, and she saw bright blue bubblefish in the water with them as well. Whenever aircraft or watercraft came into view, she dove under to avoid being noticed, and her companions went down with her.

  They had left Jacqueline Rado behind with her locally-gathered squads of white sharks and great barracudas, ready to defend the blockade in any way she could with those predators. In addition, Gwyneth knew the whales and other large creatures in the bl
ockade had their own defensive methods.

  In Kimo’s last molecular communication, he told Gwyneth he had threatened the government that he could shut down more ports in addition to San Francisco-Oakland, while also claiming that the Sea Warriors could do more than set up blockades—they could also disrupt other forms of commerce. In a press release he had threatened another West Coast attack today, without detailing what he intended to do. It was an action that Gwyneth had recommended to him earlier, a strike against one of the offshore oil-drilling platforms.

  This differed from anything she’d done before. With help from J.D. Watts and the bubblefish, they would have to take special precautions to prevent environmental damage. Kimo had emphasized this himself (and both of them thought the bubblefish could seal any leaks), but he said she needed to carry out the assignment no matter what, to increase the stakes and bring the U.S. government to its knees.

  Just off the coast of Santa Barbara on the California coast, Gwyneth and J.D. Watts made preparations for the next big Sea Warrior attack. On the seabed beneath one of the oil derricks, J.D. assembled a school of large, bright blue bubblefish around the top of the wellhole—more than two hundred of these fish. Customarily, they were used to form bubble tube enclosures to take human recruits down to the depths of the ocean to visit Moanna. Now, however, they were supposed to use their unique linked membrane and powerful jaws to form a tight seal around the wellhead—so that it did not leak oil into the water when the drilling rig was detached from it.

  That would be the first phase of their usefulness.

  For the second phase of preventing an oil leak, J.D. had kept more of the creatures in reserve. This species had dense-bodies and shape-shifting abilities that would enable them to form a long mass with their combined bodies (looking like an extinct, giant torpedo eel) that could dive down into the wellhole, plugging it and permanently stopping the flow—sacrificing their lives in the process, if it worked. Back in San Francisco Bay, J.D. Watts had practiced with all of the maneuvers that he would need, and both he and Gwyneth were confident that everything would work.

  The sabotage did not have to be perfect, because oil seeping from the ocean floor was a natural occurrence—but they did want to prevent an environmental disaster that would reflect badly on the Sea Warriors. It was a risk going on this mission at all, but a necessary one—not only to disrupt American commerce, but to make a bold comment against the exploitation of resources in the seas, including offshore oil drilling.

  When the bubblefish were in place, forming a tight membrane on the sides of the underwater drill mechanism, Gwyneth left J.D. below to supervise his phase of the operation, and she surfaced with a force of various whales, sunfish, whale sharks, and other creatures. At sunset, she sat atop yet another blue whale and ordered it to trumpet loudly. It did so, making the loudest noise of any marine animal in the world. Moments later, Gwyneth’s floating attack force advanced on the oil rig, some of them on the surface, some of them directly beneath her—and there were more underwater on the opposite side—all to put pressure on two sides of the support structure, as needed, and break it loose.

  Men on the rig saw the attackers coming on Gwyneth’s side—a huge floating mass of blubber and flesh on the surface of the ocean—and they shouted in confusion to one another, not sure what to do. Alarms sounded.

  Gwyneth drew near the rig, and from her perch she shouted: “You have ten minutes to evacuate this platform, before we destroy it.”

  Two of the men had handguns drawn, but they didn’t fire them or even point them. It was obvious that they could do little with small-caliber weapons against so many creatures, and they didn’t even know about the additional animals she had underwater. A mad scramble ensued on the rig’s platform, and they lowered small power boats into the water, boarded them, and sped off.

  Using the huge mass of marine life arrayed around and beneath her on this side, Gwyneth pressed the noses of the largest whales against one side of the rig, while using others underwater to help tilt it in the desired direction. Finally, it broke loose from the seabed and tipped over, dangling wires, tubes, and torn steel.

  While swimming along the coast to get here, Gwyneth had come up with an additional idea, and she hoped it worked. With the tall rig on its side, she ordered various marine animals to prevent it from the sinking. Underwater, the bubblefish sealed the wellhead quickly, containing any leak and then driving a dense mass of their bodies down into the wellhole, a mass that hardened and sealed the hole permanently.

  Keeping the oil derrick afloat, Gwyneth and J.D.—both on blue whales—pushed it toward a beach on the coast. At the shoreline, the animals gave the rig a final hard push, and shoved it all the way to a highway that ran along the coast.

  “That should get their attention,” J.D. Watts said to her, from his perch on the other whale.

  “Now let’s do a little cleanup,” she said. “When we were on the sea bottom, I saw a lot of junk, including what looks like an old fishing boat with barnacles all over it. I think we should raise the wreck and send it ashore, along with the other garbage down there.”

  J.D. smiled. “I like the way you think.”

  He encircled the sunken boat with bubblefish, and they created a membrane around it, which they then filled with air—thus raising the wreck to the surface of the sea. A pod of mottled gray and white orca whales (unusual in their coloration) pushed the hulk ashore and rammed it up on the beach. Gwyneth and her companions followed that up with a pile of tangled fishing nets, lines, and gear, along with a bent shark cage, a block and tackle (connected to a bent davit), a rusted old automobile motor, anchors and anchor chains, a refrigerator, hunks of concrete, truck tires, and a pile of broken tombstones—dumping all of it on the shore.

  “The ocean is not a garbage dump,” Gwyneth said. And she transmitted this message to Kimo, along with a report on the oil derrick.…

  By the following morning, Kimo had received the satisfying message from Gwyneth, reporting on what she had done, and telling him she was standing by for further instructions. He had already heard another version of her activities reported back to him by one of the Sea Warriors, who had gone ashore on the Big Island of Hawaii, and seen it on a television news program.

  Kimo liked the idea she’d come up with, of cleaning garbage off the seabed and tossing it ashore. He liked the concept so much, in fact, that he thought he might expand it in the Hawaiian Islands and elsewhere.

  But first, he had something else in mind, something bigger he wanted to clean up first—and it was like a pustule on the surface of the sea. He recalled hearing about a huge mass of floating plastic and other garbage circling in the North Pacific Ocean, covering more than five thousand square kilometers of ocean surface. It was known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

  He dispatched Dirk Avondale to take as many dolphins to the region as he could round up, to see if he could push the floating junk toward the mainland of the United States, and spread it on the beaches there.

  Dirk left immediately, expressing his eagerness to complete the task.

  After slamming an eight-foot, mini-tidal wave into the cliff of the uninhabited island, Alicia continued to practice with this type of wave and with others that she could generate. Kimo was with her now, watching intently as she raised an even higher wall of water, this one at least twelve feet tall. It was wider than the previous one as well, too, at least fifty feet instead of twenty-five.

  With her eyes open she visualized the wave in motion, and saw it picking up speed, rushing away from her toward the cliff, slamming harder into it than before—with more velocity and mass. This time the entire cliff-face, at least seventy feet in height, cracked, a jagged line that ran from the top to the bottom, and a large section of the whole thing crumbled and fell, like the edge of an iceberg falling off. At the base of the cliff, the water dissipated around the rubble of dirt and rock.

  “Your waves can create a lot of damage on the shore,” Kimo said, “and mig
ht even seem like a rogue wave when it strikes ships and oil derricks.”

  “It’s still not a full-fledged tidal wave,” Alicia said, “but I feel like I can improve on it. Maybe we’ll have one soon.”

  “It’s already big enough for us to add to our repertoire of weapons and threats,” Kimo said. “I’ll keep it in the bank until the next round. First, let’s see if our latest efforts have had any effect on the stubborn American president.”

  ***

  Chapter 4

  Kimo, Alicia, and other hybrids swam in warm, shallow water, just off the remote islet north of the main islands, where the Sea Warriors maintained their clandestine headquarters. The sun was rising over the Hawaiian archipelago as it did on any typical day, but Kimo knew this was not going to be an ordinary day. None were since he’d decided to target Hawaiian tourist beaches in a protest demonstration to show his unhappiness at the way humans treated the ocean. It had been an event that escalated from the outset, and with the latest developments, the conflict seemed destined to involve the entire planet.

  So be it, he thought as he dove underwater and beheld the spectacular sight of a still-vibrant coral reef colony. He watched small, colorful fish flitting about energetically, saw a stingray burrowing into the sandy seabed, and a green turtle swimming toward the surface. Momentous change cannot occur without conflict.

  The target of the Sea Warriors was the biggest polluting nation in the history of mankind—the United States of America—a self-absorbed country that was like a huge, ravenous beast that sucked up most of the resources in the world and then regurgitated what it didn’t want, with much of it ending up in the ocean.

  Focusing first on the powerful U.S. was risky, but if they could be forced to capitulate, other industrialized nations would fall into line more easily. The evening before, Alicia had recommended a Declaration of Ocean Independence to him, a severe document that would prevent humans from rampantly exploiting the seas anymore, the basis of a new international law that would make the ocean off-limits to mankind, except for any medical or other worthy uses that could be derived from those waters, under the strict control of dedicated Sea Warriors.