All The Mermaids In The Sea

by Robert W Cabell

  Beneath the paper were deeds to various properties in those locations and many others around the globe to be held in trust for Adara Thorson. More papers named Holger her legal guardian should anything happen to Halder and Miranda, all signed and notarized a month before Adara’s birth by Halder and Miranda Thorson, the Duke and Duchess Brahe-Sinkel-Laurvig of Egeskov.

  Halder died a duke! He and Halder had grown up with the stories of the mysterious Duke and Duchess of Egeskov. Holger’s mind kept spinning.

  The rest of the papers were about Oceanus, a charitable foundation created by the duchy after World War I for war relief. It had somehow grown over the past decade or so into a multi-billion-dollar, nonprofit organization for advancements in marine biology and environmental conservation. There was a document naming Halder and Holger co-CEOs for life, with the stipulation that the position would be passed down to their children.

  No wonder Oceanus has funded all of my research grants over the past decade, thought Holger in wonderment. But why all the elaborate precautions before Adara—or rather Pearl—was even born? “Who killed Halder and Miranda? Where did all this money come from?” Holger mumbled under his breath. He continued reading until his mind could take no more. “So the rumors of ties to the royal family of Denmark and Oceanus are true,” he muttered.

  There were too many questions to ask and too much information. He couldn’t process any more. His head was going to explode! The only thing besides the papers in the box was a signet ring with a Trident carved deeply into it. It was a very large ring, made for a bigger man than Holger, and he was over six foot two and a solid two hundred pounds.

  The design was beautifully crafted. The ring looked to be pure gold. There were brilliant jewels set into the inside of the ring. You can’t even see them when you wear the ring. So why are they there? he wondered.

  Holger studied the ring again. It looked vaguely Samarian. There were ten perfectly matched baguette-shaped gems unlike any he had ever seen. They were an intense Mediterranean blue on the outer edge, gradating down to a rich turquoise color in the center with a star reflection, like a star sapphire, but with the crystal clarity of the finest diamond. Each seemed to pulse with an electric power, was warm to the touch, and seamlessly flush with the inner surface of the band. There was a little paper note on a string tied around the ring. In Halder’s handwriting it read, “Wear it always, Bro.”

  He slipped it on his left ring finger and felt a little flash of heat as it seemed to resize itself automatically to fit snugly.

  “Okay, what family heirloom did I stick my finger into this time?” Holger said aloud. “Considering the family, it might be a lot more than I bargained for,” he prophesized.

  Holger closed the safety deposit box and asked the private banking representative for the use of the photocopier. He made three duplicates of all the documents: one for himself, one to FedEx to his lawyer in Hawaii, and another set to send to his friends Randy and Amy for safe keeping. Then he placed all the originals back in the box, locked it, added his son Hal to the signature card, paid for another twenty years of storage, and left the bank without looking back.

  Hostile Waters

  To the admiral’s consternation, the waters of the Hawaiian Islands were a madhouse, and Pearl’s exit had been fast and well executed. It seemed as if all the dolphins and whales within a hundred miles had followed her out past the reef and then dispersed in different directions.

  If he hadn’t known better, Admiral Greystone would have thought these animals were spreading the news of her coming throughout the ocean. All of this activity had confounded naval intelligence until “the sphere,” as they officially named it, appeared.

  “Admiral,” the lieutenant called out as he entered the war room with another satellite photo. “We have another sphere.”

  “Where?” the admiral barked. The lieutenant circled the location on the map and then handed the admiral the photo.

  “Yes!” the admiral whooped. “She’s still making a beeline for South America. We have the USS Honolulu, the USS Columbia, and the USS Olympia all headed toward the area. I want them to re-deploy at ten degrees latitude by ninety degrees longitude and form a blockade.”

  “The Honolulu and the Columbia are cruising at top speed from Hawaii,” the lieutenant told him. “They can drive her toward the blockade. The Olympia is cruising at top speed straight across the Pacific from the Asiatic. It’s a lot of deep open water, but if we get as many divers in the water as we can, and deploy as many submarine nets as possible, we might have a chance.”

  “I want those nets strung out for as many miles as we can get them,” the admiral said, and then grunted. “And contact the Air Force and get me some transport planes jam packed with every sub net we have in our warehouses and ship holds and get them out there now.”

  “Yes sir, Admiral.” The lieutenant turned and headed for the door.

  “How much time do we have before she reaches the coordinates?” the admiral asked before the lieutenant got halfway to the door.

  “At her current rate of travel, it could be as soon as ten hours or as long as fourteen,” he answered.

  “Let’s pray for at least twelve then, and get those subs moving!”

  Just Like Ice Cream

  I’ve been swimming forever, Pearl thought loudly to her little aquatic entourage. They had, in fact, been swimming for several days now, but what else do sea creatures do? So to them it was just another odd, though royal thought. Pearl had always told her parents she could never have enough swimming time, but she had been wrong.

  Having Echo humming in her ear and keeping her hair together did make things a little better. She had discovered several different ways to wear her hair now, and Echo had learned to style it for her on command. At night she twisted it up into a beehive-sized bun to keep the floating mass from collecting algae, and Echo hungrily ate what did settle in. For top-speed swimming, the little starfish nestled at the nape of Pearl’s neck, pulling the front locks on either side of her face back for an aerodynamic profile. Swimming and learning how to be a mermaid at the same time was exhausting.

  Pearl was desperate for some ice cream and a couple of hours of good TV. Sci-fi and fantasy were her favorites, not the bloody, chew-’em-up monster kind, or the “Friday the 13th,” Freddy nightmare stuff either. She was a “Stargate,” unicorns, dragons, and Harry Potter kind of girl. And she really missed her “Lord of the Rings” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” DVDs. She never stopped watching those.

  She knew everything there was to know about elves and fairies, just as she knew all about mermaids. She always wished that Frodo and Sam had met some mermaids along the way to help overthrow the orcs or aid the elves, but it never happened. And the Harry Potter books didn’t really paint a pretty picture about mermaids either. She was pretty sure that J.K. Rowlings hadn’t researched that part of her books very well, but she still loved them anyway.

  “Yeah, some vanilla ice cream with caramel and chocolate fudge sauce, and a few hours of “Lord of the Rings” would be really great right about now,” she said aloud.

  “What is ‘ice cream,’ Princess?” Sandy asked as they swarm along.

  “Food, Sandy. Really delicious food,” Pearl said, and then sighed.

  “What makes it better than other food?” Sandy asked.

  “Well … ummm …” Pearl was trying to figure out how to explain it. “It’s cold but sweet and sort of smooth and creamy tasting. It just melts in your mouth.”

  “Plankton?” Sandy asked.

  “No, not plankton!” Pearl giggled.

  “Red shrimp plankton is cold and maybe what you call sweet and creamy. It does what you seem to mean—melt in your mouth.”

  “It does?” Pearl asked in surprise.

  “It does,” Sandy stated firmly, as she dove straight down into the deep water. Coral and Prickle squeaked in delight and followed. Pearl decided she would too.

  Pearl had seen the tiny red shrimp drif
ting along with the other plankton as it rose up to feed at night and then sank back down before dawn. They were a bright crimson red and very attractive for shrimp, but she had thought them way too tiny to bother with. When she reached the point where Sandy hovered, she found that the shrimp were still deep enough not to have mixed with the shallower plankton; in fact, they were schooled together in a pinkish-red cloud.

  “Princess,” Sandy instructed, “just swim along with them, open your mouth, and take nice big swallows. You will see Sandy is right, they are creamy.”

  What the heck? Pearl thought. It won’t be ice cream, but it will be something different. So she opened her mouth up and dove through a cloudy cluster of them, then swallowed. “Hmmmm!” Pearl smiled. “The ice cream of the sea. I like it. I really like it!” So, she dove through another cloud of shrimp, and then another, and another, with Sandy, Coral, and Prickle, right behind her.

  A Whale of a Time

  Seaman Tyler Miller, the sonar operator aboard the USS Olympia, sat up slowly, staring at his screen as the number and size of the blips began to swell. Hundreds—no thousands—of dolphins, whales, and big, big fish were coursing toward them.

  “Captain, you’d better come look at this, because you’re not going to believe it if I just tell you!” Tyler shouted.

  Captain Marshall was a twenty-five-year navy veteran, and more than one thing he didn’t believe in had already happened today. He wasn’t sure he was ready for another. He walked over to stare at the screen and muttered, “Maybe there really are mermaids, because nothing else could pull something like this off!”

  He stood there and watched as the sonar became a solid mass of blips, and then the blips seemed to divide into three sections, with one of them heading toward his ship. Captain Marshall ordered the divers to suit up and get into the water. They were Navy Seals, not just any divers. They lived and breathed the ocean. Instead of standard air tanks, they were equipped with the most up-to-date re-breathers that produced a recycling air supply and didn’t emit a constant stream of bubbles. This equipment allowed the divers to blend in with the fish population and stay down much, much longer. They also wore steel-mesh, shark-proof scuba armor to dissuade any hungry predator from grabbing them for a quick bite to eat.

  The Navy Seals went smoothly into action, deploying the submarine nets across the blockade area between the USS Honolulu, Columbia, and Olympia. These nets were not made of nylon or heavy cord, but were woven of steel cables that could trap an atomic submarine dead in its tracks.

  Chief Petty Officer “Sharky” Jones, as his men had dubbed him, was an underwater demolition specialist who had sent more than one ship to the bottom during his secret government missions. He was not a believer in mermaids.

  To Jones, this whole op was just some screwy mission handed down from on high by the idiot in the White House. “He may be the commander in chief, but if he’s buying this story, he might as well move the capital of the United States to Atlantis,” Sharky muttered to himself before barking his next order.

  “All right, men, deploy all the buoys, check chain connections top and bottom, and make sure each weight is secure! Let’s roll ’em down!”

  The giant nets began to spool down to a depth of five hundred feet. They couldn’t deploy all the way to the bottom, but their presence would force anything that came up against them to go down deep and under, where the bulk of Sharky’s men were spread out and waiting. Each of them was armed with a net cannon—four-foot-long, high-density resin tubes, ten inches in diameter, with special compression chambers that hurled out a seventy-five-pound projectile at eight feet per second underwater. They were like aquatic bazookas. The projectile was, in fact, a twenty-foot-wide circular net that spread out as it entered the water. Whatever got in its path was captured when twenty-five three-pound weights distributed around the edge of the net caused it to twist and spin. The net and the weights totaled 140 pounds, and that, added to the weight of whatever was in the net, rendered the captive helpless.

  Chief Sharky watched his men’s efficient deployment with pride. Then he looked out and choked at the sight racing toward him. It was a massive wall of marine life comprised of every kind of whale, shark, dolphin, tuna, marlin, swordfish, octopus, and any other fish you could imagine. They were actually organized in ranks! But what made the image absolutely Spielberg was the girl on the back of the biggest manta ray he had ever seen, leading the charge like some warrior princess version of King Neptune.

  “Well slap me across the face and dress me in a skirt,” he said, grunting, “there really is a mermaid!”

  Lieutenant Shawn Moore and his men had been deployed to do one job and one job only: video the entire operation for naval intelligence. He was in position in an observation cage suspended underneath the USS Olympia in the center of the blockade, about twelve feet behind the center submarine net Sharkey’s Seals had deployed. He was using the most powerful underwater video camera ever made, and all the floodlights on the hulls of the ships were on and operational. The lights gave the water a sci-fi-esque, unearthly glow, and what they saw coming toward them looked like something right out of a George Lucas movie. Shawn took a deep breath and zoomed in with his lens.

  The mermaid seemed to be a very lovely girl about age eighteen, completely normal except for a long fish tail where her legs should have been, and a starfish holding her knee-length hair back. It was also a bit unusual to see a real, live mermaid perched on top of a mammoth manta ray, riding it like a living chariot. But somehow with thousands of whales, dolphins, tuna, and sharks playing nicely together, that didn’t seem like the strangest observation. The weirdest part was the fact that she was wearing a light-purple Speedo sports top and had a mesh catch bag belted around her waist.

  If that hadn’t been enough to throw Lieutenant Moore, she smiled directly at him, whipped out a 1st Scuba CA-2 deluxe underwater digital camera from her catch bag, pushed the zoom button, and took a picture of him! He even obliged her with a stupid, mind-numbed grin! Then she waved at him and suddenly blinked out of existence. She hadn’t moved … she’d vanished! He was not going to write this in his report. No, he was going to check in for a complete psychiatric analysis.

  The mermaid’s disappearance seemed to be the signal for the whole underwater world to go mad. The vanguard of dolphins and killer whales split off and spread out on either side of the mermaid’s manta ray. They soared up out of the water, over the top of the submarine nets, and started attacking the buoys that held them up. A rank of hammerhead sharks closed the gap in front, just after a wave of squid and octopuses swarmed up, out, and down the front side of the net. They launched themselves at the facemasks and hands of all the divers holding the cannon nets, rendering them useless in seconds. Next, schools of tuna dive-bombed the divers, knocking the net cannons from their hands and pinning the men against the submarine nets.

  Immediately behind the grappling squid and dive-bombing tuna came platoons of fifty-foot whale sharks who attacked the nets themselves. They gnashed at them with their gargantuan maws trying to stretch the bobbing and swaying nets. Surging up to the surface with military precision, a cavalry of killer whales chomped at the buoys that suspended the vast nets. With that much tension, and thousands of gnashing dagger-sized ivory teeth shredding the buoys, it was only a few moments until—snap, crunch, bam—the buoys caved in. The massive titanium chains connecting the nets to the buoys snapped, and the submarine nets went plummeting down into the deep.

  “Captain! You’re gonna want to see this!” Miller shouted as he frantically pointed to the sonar screen.

  Several hundred sperm whales and humpback whales had lined up like tin soldiers and slammed into the full length of each cruiser. They used their massive bodies as battering rams to shove and nearly swamp the 567-foot ships! A single sperm whale against a cruiser was nothing to fear. Seventy or eighty of them, angry and lined up bashing the hull in unison, was terrifying. The observation cage Shawn was shooting from, still tethe
red to the Olympia, started swinging fiercely back and forth with the ship under the onslaught of the whales.

  “What the …?” Captain Marshall gasped a second before the hull of the ship vibrated with an impact down the entire length of the starboard side. It was a solid thump that shook the whole ship. Then it started to rock back and forth.

  As soon as the submarine nets snapped loose and sank, the giant manta ray and a whale shark surged ahead, followed by a legion of other sea denizens. The moment the manta ray was a hundred feet past the blockade, the mermaid suddenly reappeared on its back. That seemed to signal the squid and octopuses to detach themselves from the divers. They turned in unison and fled after her while the whale sharks swung back, again with military precision. Like ancient warriors creating a shield barrier for retreating comrades, they hovered a few moments longer. It took no imagination for the men to take the gnashing of massive jaws and glares from bulging black eyes as a threat, just before the creatures spun back around as one to follow their mermaid commander.

  At that exact same moment, the whales stopped rocking the ships and formed up a rear guard and departed at top speed. Shawn’s cage slowly stopped swinging wildly from one side to the other.

  The whole engagement had taken less than three minutes. A girl on a manta ray with some trained fish and sea mammals had outwitted, outgunned, outmaneuvered, and outrun the most highly trained and expensively equipped naval force in the history of the world. The entire unit was left staggering and sputtering in disbelief and awe at the worst defeat and the shortest military engagement in history.