The Stormcrow, A Superhero's Tale Options

[SubRosa]

Acadian: That was a nice interlude for January to flex her wings and take the moment to sharpen her abilities to adapt to the upcoming challenge of descending into the deep. I liked writing it because it gave another opportunity to show how magic works, and how individual's interact with it.

Jan's Elements are the classic five: Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and Spirit. Though that is not to say those are the official ones for the world. There are as many or few as each individual magician believes there are. It all depends on how you look at it.

I suppose if January was a Transformer she would turn into a Chevy Bolt, or maybe a Lightning GT.

That would have been an excellent opportunity for Calypso to have a sidekick . Or even a pet like Viuda's tarantula Toby. Sadly I never had the opportunity to get that deep into her development. Silverlight OTOH does have someone whom we will eventually meet - her contact in the Pentagon.


Renee: I made a playlist of sailing songs to listen to while I wrote the underwater scenes in this story, to help get me in the mood. Things like Downeaster Alexa, Orinoco Flow, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Sloop John B, that sort of thing. I am listening to it right now.

Silverlight's Mind Link is a pretty standard power for Telepaths. It is basically just a psychic radio that a team can all use to communicate with.

Autobots, Roll Out! is sort of the catch phrase for the Transformers. Their leader Optimus Prime says when they go into action.

Calypso needs to have a way to disguise her boat, otherwise anyone will be able to look up the name, flag of origin, serial numbers, etc... and find out her secret identity. Otherwise it would be the same as a super driving into action with the license plates visible on their car.











Calypso's Theme Music = Elton John - The Circle of Life

Hudson Canyon can be found on the Stormcrow Map

Continental Shelf/Slope Transition

Six-Gill Shark

Hagfish



Book 12.27 - Broken Arrow

While the ocean had seemed featureless from above, down here it was something different. On one hand, yes, the water disappeared into a blue haze in all directions. But that haze was not empty. She saw fish of various kinds suspended within this liquid world all around. She could not come close to identifying any of them. She just knew that there were big ones and small ones, fat ones and sleek ones. It was like a different planet from the one she lived upon.

Soon the soft blue all around faded to deep velvet, and they passed into a realm of eternal twilight. Here the normally bright rays of the sun were nothing but a pale glimmer overhead. The distance at which everything turned to an indistinguishable haze closed in sharply now, and narrowed the world to a small space around the heroes.

Yet if anything January noted there was more life around them than before, and in ever stranger shapes. There was a little squid that swam so that one big, bulbous yellow eye eternally pointed up, and another, far smaller black eye on the other side of its body faced ever down. There was a jellyfish that looked almost like a transparent traffic cone. There were fish of all sizes and shapes, and even more types of squid, and octopi, and others.

Twilight soon melted into total blackness. Well, it would have, were it not for Silverlight. The lunar stone of her staff Mene's headpiece gave off a continuous glow. Like the moon in a night sky, it was a literal light shining through the darkness. This created a zone of illumination around the heroes. After a moment Calypso waved one hand through the water around her, and a second glow of light sprang up around them. Beyond these twin beacons, the world simply vanished into inky darkness.

January stretched out into the astral with her senses, and immediately this seemingly empty void was filled with life. She did not bother to close her eyes, as she often did when astrally sensing. There was little her meat eyes could do to distract her magical senses here. Beyond her immediate group of allies, the marine world was lit by the warm glow of both magic and life. The latter came in all shapes and sizes. Some floated aimlessly in the water, others darted to and fro with seeming purpose.

Through it all January began to detect a faint rain of particles that slowly fell down alongside them. To her meat eyes it looked like snow. To her astral senses it was clearly something biological. In fact, it was a lot of something biological. But it was not alive. In the magical realm she could sense that it was tiny bits and pieces from many, many beings. It reminded January of some sort of detritus, like nail clippings, or flaked-off skin.

"Marine snow," Calypso's telepathically projected voice rang through her skull. "That is what it is called. It is tiny bits of organic material that falls down from the upper levels of the ocean. Scales, droppings, mucus, bits of flesh from dead fish, and so on. Everything above us eventually falls down here, and becomes one of the primary fuels for life in the deep."

January turned that over in her head. It was bits of dead fish and marine mammals that were falling down around her. But then again, it was not like fish had cemeteries. When something in the ocean died it was naturally going to end up one place: the bottom.

So far her water breathing spell was holding up fine. She was now thankful that she was not straining oxygen from the water with gills like a regular fish did. Then she would be breathing in all that second-hand fish snot. Instead the element of Air itself filled her lungs and bloodstream with life-giving oxygen.

Still, she was reminded of an old quote by Joseph Campbell. "Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else."

Or as Elton John might say, it was the circle of life.

"What is that?" Mercury's voice came through the mental link loud and clear, with an unmistakable note of trepidation.

January snapped her awareness around, even as Calypso slowed their descent to a halt. That gave them all a chance to see what the Philadelphian meant. It was a gigantic fish, well over twenty feet long. It could only be a shark, given its distinctive shape. But it was odd. Its dorsal fin was practically non-existent, and pushed far back along its body. Its pectoral fins were likewise smaller than normal, and its head possessed a blunt shape.

It came near enough that January could see its face with her meat eyes now. She was immediately struck by its gaze. All of the sharks January had ever seen in pictures had black eyes. Like a doll's eyes some might say. But these looked all-too human, with slightly iridescent pupils that were set within a wider white sclera. It was like a person looked back at her, rather than an animal.

"Hexanchus griseus!" Calypso exclaimed. "A sixgill shark. We are lucky indeed, to meet this fellow. They are very rare. I wish we had more time. I would love to swim with him and film him. I have not seen one this far north in the Atlantic before."

"Yeah but is it going to try to eat us?" Mercury said what January was thinking. She had seen the movie Jaws. She knew that it was fiction, and that not all sharks acted like the one in that movie. Actually that no sharks acted like the one in that movie, given that it ate ships. But that cold, rational portion of her mind was fighting with the reptilian part that was screaming at her to start punching.

"Nah, trust me bro, we taste like old jock straps to sharks." Ranger assured the other man. "I've swum with them plenty of times. They don't want none of this..."

"Speak for yourself!" Mercury laughed. "I assure you, I am highly desired! Just usually not by fish..."

"It is probably just curious because of the light," Calypso noted. "As long as it does not think we are competition for food, we are fine. Besides, it will not be able to keep up with us."

With that, Calypso whirled her staff around, and the team once more swept down into the depths. As the aquanaut had said, they left the shark far, far behind them as they continued ever to the bottom. At least January imagined that was where they were headed. She had no real way to orient herself in the utter darkness. They could have been going up, and she would not have known it.

As she had expected, the pressure began to mount as they descended. It started as a gentle touch all around her. Then it slowly turned into a tighter and tighter squeeze. But the spell Calypso had taught her adjusted as they went deeper, and countered it all the while. January could feel the water pressing in, and felt the magic pressing back. That kept her mostly in equilibrium, mostly. But the reality of the crushing weight of the water above her was ever present in her mind.

The same was true of the cold. January was keenly aware of the chill that seeped into her bones from the water around her. But whether it was due to the spell Calypso had taught her, or her own natural invulnerabilities, it did not really bother January either. Rather it merely felt like a crisp spring morning.

This might have seemed like a simple sight-seeing trip so far. But there was no mistaking the fact that this was the most dangerous journey January had ever taken. In some ways it was even more deadly than the Abyss itself. That world—as alien and inimical to life as it had been—had not tried to crush her into a fine mist and choke the life from her lungs.

Then something did come into view. It was the bottom. January could sense it beneath them through the astral. In a way it reminded her of a grassy hillside. But in this case it was not plant life that she sensed embedded within and overlaying the crust of the earth below. Rather it was a plethora of that marine detritus that snowed down from above. Along with it were numerous small animals, such as sea cucumbers, urchins, lobsters, crabs, and the like.

From this blanket of life and organic matter, she was able to make out that they stood upon the edge of an underwater ridge or escarpment. Behind them the land was relatively flat. But before them it sloped down sharply to some lower depth, as of yet unplumbed and unseen. January hoped there were no shoggoths down there. Now she regretted reading all those Lovecraft stories when she was younger...

"We are at the edge of the continental shelf," Calypso explained. "It is the relatively shallow water that rings the continents. During the last Ice Age much of this would have been above sea level. Before us is the continental slope. It angles down to the true depths below."

The ridge went off as far as she could sense to her left. But when she looked to her right, January saw that the continual slope and shelf alike were rent open by a wide, jagged slash. It was like some giant had split it open with a massive, celestial axe. It was so wide that January could not sense the far wall of this deep crevasse. She could only sense the void it created in the slope around her. It was like they hung at the edge of the Grand Canyon.

"Welcome to Hudson Canyon," Calypso declared. She moved her staff about, and the team of heroes swept off to the side. For a moment they hung suspended over the black waters of the canyon. The then they plunged straight down into the ravine. "This is a deep notch cut by the flow of the Hudson River. We are near the lower end, meaning here it is over half a mile wide."

"It feels like a different planet down here." Hwarang gave voice to what January felt. She wondered if Janos Heisen had felt the same when he had descended into the atmosphere of Jupiter.

"Which way Silverlight," Calypso turned to their eldest sister present, who still clutched the old parachute to her breast.

"That way," Silverlight pointed one marble hand out, toward the deeper water beyond the open maw of the canyon. "Somewhere down there."

"Are we close?" Mercury wondered as they swept down the canyon walls, and plunged deeper into the abyss.

"I cannot tell," Silverlight shook her head. "It's confusing now... It wants to pull me in more than one direction."

"So you mean you aren't sure which way to go?" The exasperation was clear in Ranger's psychic voice. "Has that ever happened before?"

"I don't know," Silverlight said. "I've never done this before."

"You've never done this before!" Now it was Hwarang's turn to voice consternation. "You could be leading us on a wild goose chase down here!"

"She will lead us to the wreckage," January declared with certitude. "I know it. Just give her some time."

"It could be that the plane has broken up into multiple pieces," Calypso considered. "This often happens with ships. I sometimes find parts of them miles away from the main wreckage, and even that can often be broken in two or three separate sections."

"So Keep 19 might be spread all over the bottom here," Mercury managed to whistle in January's head. "Oy vey! This makes things... more interesting."

"We will have to go one at a time, until we rule them all out," Calypso insisted. "Just pick one bearing and follow it Silverlight. We shall see what we find, when we find it."

With that they continued on, until they finally hit the very bottom at the base of the canyon. It felt strange to feel land under her feet. Or at least underwater land, such as it was. Given that there was an entire ocean on top of her, January had the feeling that the world was somehow upside down. The land was supposed to be at the top of the water, not the bottom of it!

If not for the bits of marine snow suspended all around, January would have thought that she was standing in the desert. There was no plant life here at all. Instead it was a long sheet of what looked like dirt, mixed with tiny stones and a layer of silt. The muddy surface was not featureless however. It was an endless plain of tiny hills and pockmarks, ridges and troughs. It reminded January of the surface of the moon. Though unlike that heavenly body however, most of these features were only a few inches in height or depth either way down here.

They now trudged along the bottom, and their feet kicked up small clouds of silt in their wake. They came upon a cluster of long and slender life forms, and January could not help but to lower her astral senses for a moment and look at them with purely meat eyes. They were hagfish! She could not contain her delight at seeing the serpentine creatures, with their spiky-crowned heads. They writhed and swum about, and seemed to be picking away at the carcass of some long-dead sea animal.

"Look at them!" January exclaimed. "Aren't they beautiful?"

"They look kind of gross..." Ranger murmured.

"Yeah, what's so exciting about eels?" Mercury wondered.

"Those are hagfish, not eels," Calypso pointed out.

"My original armor was made from their snot!" January declared. "Gadget still uses it too, as the base layer for his powered armor."

She wanted to reach out to try to pet one. But even now the others were following Silverlight ever onward.

"Ewww!" Ranger's disgust was clear in his mental voice.

"That's just... nasty..." Mercury added.

"No, that is brilliant!" Calypso insisted. "Hagfish eject a cloud of mucus as a defense mechanism. It is filled with extremely strong and flexible fibers. I have read that the US Navy was experimenting with using it to coat the hulls of their ships in order to reduce drag."

"It is really, really good at fire defense too. It saved my life in the Flying Dutchman fire." January turned away from the hagfish, and hurried to catch up to the others. "It's handy for stopping bullets too."

[Acadian]

What a fascinating journey to the ocean floor! You clearly did a bunch of research here and it seemed very real as the heroes made their way ever deeper. I hadn’t thought of the cold but I’m sure glad they had some provisions for that.

I also hadn’t considered that the B-52 likely came apart on impact and its pieces could indeed rest miles apart. This could be like looking for a pair of nuclear needles in a haystack. . . in the dark. Don't fail us now, Moon Witch!

[Renee]

Wow that shark's really aggressive. That'd be so scary. One little crack in their spyglass or if that shark dislodged some crucial equipment....

I can't believe they're all going down into the depths. And then there's no natural light.

Pressure builds as they go deeper, yeesh. 🐟 I think I've watched every OceanGate video on YouTube over these past 11 months, so I know what's happening. Can't believe they're doing this; so freaky. Good thing their spells aren't substituting whatever the magical equivalent of carbon fiber is. "You are remembered for the rules you break!" Oh yeah buddy, you got that right.

What's a shoggoth? Whoooooa. Gotta start reading that Lovecraft book again.

Yeesh, the plane's all broken up. Indeed, the impact upon the surface would've torn it up. Still. Wonder if the bomb is even here! 💣

The land was supposed to be at the top of the water, not the bottom of it!

What a world.

I'd be so afraid a hagfish would start trying to leech off their legs or something. That's another thing we heard as kids (me & friends) about the Great Lakes. Catfish as big as cars, and giant eels, too.

This post has been edited by Renee: May 29 2024, 03:43 PM

[SubRosa]

Acadian: I spent a lot of time reading and watching ocean documentaries like the Blue Planet serieses. Blue Planet II has a good episode called The Deep that I watched about four times to pick out details from, and just to get the look and feel of the sea floor from.

I forgot about the cold at first too. But then I remembered that the bottom of the ocean is just a few degrees above the freezing point of water. In some places it is actually lower, but the salinity of the water is so high that it cannot freeze.

My original thought was that the B-52 would be in one piece on the ocean floor. Then I started doing research on shipwrecks, and found that many are found in pieces, and sometimes their debris field can spread out across miles. Like the Titanic, or Edmund Fitzgerald. So I decided to go that route, and have Keep-19 be in pieces. It also brings home how devastating the crash into the sea was. There was no surviving it.


Renee: Those sharks can go a year between eating, so they can get very territorial on the rare occasions they have to actually eat. However, once they realized that the submersible was not there to steal their dinner, they left it alone.

I watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau when I was a children in the 70s. I rewatched them all again a couple times over lockdown. They are all on YouTube now. I was amazed at how quickly the light disappears underwater. You do not have to go that far at all before you end up in total blackness. Almost all the ocean has never seen a ray of sunlight.

Shoggoths are a creature that Lovecraft introduced in one of his last stories - At the Mountains of Madness. They were a slave race of formless protoplasms created by the race of Elder Things, who came to Earth from another planet hundreds of millions of years ago. The Elder Things also created humans, either as an accident or a joke. In time the Shoggoths rose up and slaughtered the Elder Things. Some of them still haunt the old Elder Thing cities, deep beneath Antarctic Ocean. In some of the post Lovecraft mythos stories other authors have had them actually impersonate humans, essentially wearing human skin suits. Michael Shea has some good stories with them.

I don't think we have catfish that big here! We do have regular cats though, and fish! Honestly though, the most dangerous thing in the Great Lakes is probably E Coli. We get outbreaks sometimes because of people dumping raw sewage in the lakes.




Silverlight's Theme Music = Lindsey Sterling - Lord of the Rings Medley

B-52 Bomber

B-52 Cockpit Layout

Mark 39 Nuclear Bomb

The Nereids

Klingon Guile



Book 12.28 - Broken Arrow

They came upon the first piece of wreckage soon after. January's heart raced as they neared it, but then crashed with anti-climax when it came into clear view. It was a wing, which had been sheared off at its base by some incredible force. January imagined hitting the surface of the ocean at jet speed might do such a thing.

It was gigantic, simply massive in size. It had to be at least seventy or eighty feet long. This clearly came from no little puddle jumper. A row of engines were suspended from the bottom of the wing. They were truly cyclopean in size, and appeared even larger because they were built in pods. Each of these consisted of two engines that had seemingly been melded together side by side. There were two of these pods, so a total of four engines hung from just this wing alone.

Most of the skin of the wing was covered in what looked to January like moss or fuzz. Here and there were larger animals, such as colorful anemones that radiated tentacles so slender that they reminded her of angel hair pasta. Spiky sea urchins rolled upon the surface of the decaying metal, while crabs and lobsters skittered around them. Shrimp floated about overhead, along with schools of fish that January could not hope to identify.

"Look at those double engines that hang from the bottom of the wing. That's from a B-52 alright." Ranger spoke with certainty."I hitched a ride in one once."

It was not what they were after. But it proved that Silverlight's homing spell was working. It was just not perfect. January made sure to get video of it on her helmet camera. She held up Sága with her GPS turned on, and made sure to get it in the same picture. That would clearly mark the site. Maybe someday, someone might want to come out and collect it. If they were not kind of busy looking for a bomb, she would have suggested they take the wreckage up to the surface with them.

Silverlight took several long moments to orient herself with the parachute once more. Finally she set off again, and the rest of the team followed dutifully. They trudged down the sloping ground, and descended farther into the deep. Soon enough they discovered a second piece of wreckage. This looked like two diminutive wings that protruded from a narrow fuselage. But it was much, much too small to be what they were looking for.

Again, the wreckage was covered in that marine fuzz. January imagined that it might be bacterial growths, or algae, or some sort of microbial colonies. She seemed to recall something about the Titanic wreck being covered in that sort of thing. Along with it came even more fish and other bottom life than she had seen before on the wing. This might have been the wreckage of humanity, but here on the bottom of the sea it was an oasis for life.

That made her change her mind about bringing the wreckage up. It was better off where it was. In its life the plane had been a weapon of war, created to kill entire cities. But down here in its watery grave it had ironically become a foundation for life. She could not think of a better place for it.

"It's the tail section," Mercury noted. "But it looks like the rudder is gone. Maybe it was sheared off in the crash?"

"Or maybe it being sheared off caused the crash?" Calypso wondered.

So they continued on, and plunged ever down the slope into the abyss. By now the canyon wall on their left had long since vanished from both January's physical and astral senses. Clearly they had gone beyond it, and were out in the open ocean. The world now became nothing but the muddy bottom, which seemed to slope ever downward into infinity.

"How deep are we?" Hwarang wondered.

"Now that we are beyond the continental slope, over three thousand feet," the aquanaut replied easily. "It still gets much deeper however, down in the abyssal plain ahead."

The term "abyssal plain" made January shudder in spite of herself. She did not like the sound of that.

"How deep is it there?" Silverlight asked.

"In this part of the Atlantic?" Calypso thought about it for a moment, "I would say well over ten thousand feet."

"So, two miles underwater," January mused, "damn."

"It gets much, much deeper in other places," Calypso noted. "I found the Indianapolis at nearly twice that depth, and even that is nothing compared to Challenger Deep. The ocean is deeper than Everest is tall."

"Is it all so barren?" asked Hwarang. "Aside from a few spots like that wreckage back there, it feels like the surface of the moon down here."

"Oh no, not at all," Calypso answered quickly. "There are numerous miniature biomes down here at the bottom of the sea. In places brine pools into lakes, five times saltier than the rest of the sea. Methane bubbles up from them, which bacteria feed upon. That in turn is fed upon by mussels and other sea life, and so on. In still more places there are volcanic vents that jet superheated water and minerals up into the ocean. Vast colonies of life forms grow up around them, some with literal iron shells. You should see a whale fall. When they die their bodies eventually settle down here. They form an oasis for different animals that can last for decades."

"It does not look like it to the naked eye, but even this spot right here is filled with life," January noted. "I can feel it in the astral. There's all sorts of critters around here, under the mud, and walking on its surface. Worms, crabs, octopi, you name it, they are out there. It's a desert that's filled with life."

"There is no part of the deep ocean that is not home to life," Calypso declared. "Even at the bottom of the Mariana Trench there is life, as complex as fish no less! In fact, life on the Earth may have begun here on the bottom of the ocean, from those geothermal vents. Whenever I come down here, I usually discover at least one new species."

"We are close to the next piece," Silverlight broke in. "I think it's something big."

"I'll say," January felt it now, on the edge of her astral awareness. It looked like a wide, metal tube. The end facing them had been sheared open, as if someone had cut it off from a longer body. The cylindrical fuselage stretched forward from there, and eventually tapered at what had clearly been the nose of the plane. Here January could see the wide slits where the windows had once been set, which now lay open the sea. This part of the craft was crumpled into a mass of tortured metal however. It looked like it had smashed head-first into a mountain. January imagined crashing nose-first into the sea would have much the same effect.

This had to be the cockpit!

Hwarang lifted his arms, and his golden bow magically appeared in his hands. He pulled back its illuminated string, and one of his shining arrows likewise formed there. He loosed it a moment later, and the missile sped off through the water as easily as it would have done through air.

It was a flare of brilliant light that flashed through the water as it sped over the bottom. It flew into the open end of the wreckage, and stuck deep inside. It caused no damage to the plane. But it did remain glowing there, like a lantern shining in the darkness. Then the Korean-American shot another of these light arrows, and another, and soon the entire area was lit up as if by streetlights.

It was indeed the cockpit of the plane. It was so big that it had two levels. Given how the fuselage had been sheared in two, they could look inside each floor, and see down the length of the plane. Nearest to them on the upper level was a pair of ejection seats that were still bolted to the deck. They faced backwards down what would have been the stern of the plane. Now they looked right out into the open water where the heroes stood.

The compartment beyond stretched out to the nose of the plane. The ceiling here was crushed down, and the metal tangled into a mess. It looked like something large had either sat upon the roof, or crashed into it. Perhaps that had been caused by a second plane, which the hijackers who had attacked the B-52 had originated from? If so, there was no sign of where that craft had gone to.

In any case, electronic panels lined the right side of the upper level. What looked like a very simple bed was cut into the instrumentation on the left side of the fuselage. At the far end January could see two more seats that faced forward in the nose of the plane. The one on the left side had a hole burned straight through its back. Then the cockpit abruptly ended in a crumpled mass of flight controls.

The lower deck was smaller. There were two seats that faced forward at the far end of the chamber. In the center was a ladder and hatchway that led to the upper deck. The hatch that would have sealed it shut was missing. January saw it nearby, half-buried in the mud behind the plane. Another hatch was still in place in the floor of the lower fuselage, and January imagined it was how the crew normally got into and out of the plane. Nearest to January there was nothing but an open passage that must have normally led back into the bomb bay of the plane. That section of the craft was now missing of course.

Something about it all made goose bumps rise on January's flesh. She knew that was not because of the temperature of the water. That did not bother her in the slightest. There was something disturbing about that wreckage. It was a wrongness, and it instantly set her on edge.

That is when she noted that there was no microbial life growing in colonies upon the metal of the fuselage. No crabs or lobsters darted through its interior. No fish swarmed around its bulk. The metal here was pristine, and almost shiny. It looked cold, like it was frozen in time.

"There is something in there," Silverlight noted.

"You are right," Calypso agreed. "But it is no sea creature, it feels almost like..."

"A bird," January finished her sister's sentence. "That's a rook, or a raven, or is it a crow? That's weird, I can usually tell the difference. It's definitely some kind of corvid though."

"So there's a dead bird in there, big deal," Mercury shrugged.

"No, it's not dead, it's alive," January insisted. "It's the only living thing in there. I can feel it. It's in the upper deck. Look where the roof is caved in, like something big sat upon it. It's somewhere in all of that mess."

"How can a bird be down here, alive?" Hwarang asked.

"I don't know, but there's only one way to find out," January declared. She pulled her feet up from the sea floor, and pushed down gently with her wings. She flew through the water, but gently enough so as to not kick up a cloud of muddy particles within her wake.

But Cray's voice stopped her. It fact, it made her jump. He had been silent for so long, that she had forgotten he was still there.

"No, that's not what we are here for," he insisted. "You need to find those bombs. Everything else is secondary."

"This might have something to do with why the plane crashed," January argued with him, she but also unintentionally sent the same thought through the mind link.

"I know, I believe you," Silverlight replied back through the telepathic connection. "But we still have to find the bombs first, before the Atomkrieg gets here, if they have not done so already."

"She is right, we have to keep looking for the bombs," Calypso sighed. "Besides, that is a gravesite. It is illegal for us to enter. Only with the express permission of the flag state could we do so, even to recover the remains. Not that it is likely there are any left after all this time. The sea is a relentless mother. She takes back all that she births."

January pulled up to a halt at the edge of the cockpit, and peered into the wreckage within. She could definitely feel that bird somewhere in the tangle of metal at the top of the upper deck. She was certain that it was a corvid. Those were the birds she knew best! But she could not tell exactly what species, which was unusual for her. She knew a raven from a crow, or a rook, or a magpie with ease. It was just obvious after all.

But this, it almost seemed like it was all those species combined. But that was impossible.

Now she could also sense something woven through that strange bird's aura. It spoke to her of high mountain peaks, of whipping winds and thundering clouds, of fearsome tornadoes, and calm gentle breezes. It was the very magical essence of Air itself, somehow stitched into the aura of the bird. It was an enchantment of some kind, using that primordial power.

With that her mind went back to the Gaia Sisters at Belle Isle. They had seeded the devastated areas of the island with primordial earth. Then they had used that raw elemental power to breathe life back into the landscape. Someone had done likewise with this bird. But they had not used it to kick start the growth of plants. Exactly what the purpose of the enchantment upon the bird was, January could not tell. That would take more time and a closer look.

But that was still not all she felt in the wreckage. There was another entity down there as well, separate from the elementally-infused bird. It was dark and cold. Clearly it was what she had first sensed upon seeing the craft. It was near the bird's aura, almost as if it guarded it. Again, it sent a shiver down January's spine and turned her blood into ice. The freezing water around her had failed to do that. But this, this did so instantly. It was a familiar feeling by now.

"There's something dead in here too," January murmured.

"Yeah, the crew," Ranger remarked. He and the others were already moving on. January could see them across the black void of the deep, illuminated by Silverlight and Calypso's lights.

"No, Calypso's right, there's nothing even left of them," January noted. That was true. She did not see any corpses within the wreck. There was not a single bone in sight, or even their uniforms. All she saw were helmets and boots. They lay scattered around the floors of each level. The boots came in pairs, and each lay with a single helmet inches away, along with other bits and bobs of metal.

January shivered. That was what remained of the crew.

"This is the other kind of dead, the un kind." January finally went on after that moment of grim realization.

"You are right, I sense it too now," Silverlight agreed. "It might be the spirit of one of the crew. Or a faded memory of one, like a stone tape."

"Come on, we can return later if we must," Calypso urged January. "We have larger marine vertebrates to fry."

January scowled, and stared back into the open cockpit one last time. But it was silent and still as the grave it literally was. Whatever undead being lurked within, it appeared content to simply lie in wait. Part of her wished it would come out. Then she might get some answers, and maybe have the opportunity to displace some anger with her fists...

January took a moment to lift Sága to her eyes and once again record the GPS coordinates with her helmet camera. Then with an effort of will she finally tore herself away. She spread her wings again, and soared across the bottom to catch up with the others. She did not have to pour on the speed. The rest of the group moved at a walking pace, nothing compared to how fast she could fly underwater. So she rejoined them in no time at all.

Silverlight had veered off to one side and led them back up the slope, but at an angle away from the direction they had come from. They stepped around a giant landing gear a moment later. January marveled to see that the rubber of its twin tires still clung stubbornly to the metal wheels. It had survived for sixty years in the salt water. She wished that she knew the brand. She would buy a set of them the next time she needed tires for her motorcycle!

Then they found another section of fuselage. This was larger than the cockpit and tail sections they had already discovered, even if both had been put together. Once again, Hwarang lit it up with his flare arrows. That revealed the stubs of wings that protruded from its ceiling, their spans having been snapped off at some point. Certainly the wing that they had found earlier must have fit into one of those stubs. The display back at the museum had said that one wing had been found floating on the surface. So that accounted for the other one that was missing.

Unlike the cockpit, this piece of wreckage was an oasis for life. The metal shell of the fuselage was dotted in microbes and larger life forms. Fish swam through its interior, while more marine animals trundled upon the ocean floor around it. It filled astral space with the warmth and brightness of living things. That came as a stark relief to January after the cold emptiness of the previous section of wreckage.

Clearly, there was nothing undead in here.

January glanced back at the cockpit. It was not very far away, perhaps only a few hundred feet at most, and was still lit up by Hwarang's flare arrows. From its dimensions, January could see that the sheared off end of the cockpit would have fit into the leading end of this piece of fuselage. She imagined that the tail section they had found earlier would likewise fit into the far end of the wreckage as well.

"This must be the last piece!" Silverlight declared.

"I sense no others here," Calypso murmured, looking to and fro. "Let us be quick!"

They moved up to the wall of the fuselage, and began moving around toward one end of the hull. That is when Mercury simply laid a hand upon the skin of the plane. As if by his will alone, the metal flowed aside to reveal structural ribs and stringers underneath. Then those too bent out of the way, and created a wide doorway in the side of the fuselage.

Nearly this entire section of plane was taken up by the bomb bay. The leading end was sealed off by a bulkhead. The open door within it revealed a chamber beyond where a pair of giant tires from one of the plane's landing gear laid upon their side. The bay itself was a giant open space. January noticed that a large hole had been cut into the ceiling here. It looked like someone might have hacked their way through it with a saw. At the other end was another bulkhead that must have led to the tail of the plane, with a door that was still locked tight.

The bombs were right there in the middle of the bay! January could see them clearly in the glow from Silverlight's lunar staff. There were two of them, one in front of the other, still mounted on their cradles. They were gigantic, much larger than she would have imagined. They were bigger than she was! Each had that standard, tubular bomb shape. But she was surprised that the tail section was only slightly thicker than the rest, and the fins that radiated from it were just tiny stubs.

Once again, Mercury whistled over their mind link.

"These things must weigh a ton," he mused.

"Three tons each," Cray's voice came over January's earpiece. "These are Mark 39 nuclear bombs. Each has a 3.8 megaton warhead. That thicker band in the back holds a parachute."

"They look intact," January mused as the studied the two bombs. In fact, they looked practically pristine. The paint was long gone of course. But the actual casings of each device were still unscathed, even at this tremendous depth. January imagined that the fuselage of the aircraft might have protected them from impact damage from the crash. Or they may have simply been built tough.

"I am not reading any radiation through Sága's sensor," Cray's voice solemnly intoned in her ear.

While the rest of them stared at the bomb, Hwarang pulled away from the group. He half climbed, half swum up to the top of the fuselage. January could not see him through the hull of the plane. Not with her meat eyes at least. But she could feel the Korean-American up there in the astral, keeping lookout.

"I can separate them from the bomb cradles with no problem," Mercury observed. "But I can't make metal levitate, or fly, or get them to the surface."

"Give me a moment, and I will summon a water elemental," Silverlight insisted. "It can do all the heavy lifting."

With that the statuesque woman closed her silver eyes, and held her hands together as if in prayer. A magic circle sprang up around her feet. Ancient Greek characters flowed between its inner and outer rings of silver light, and slowly turned around her. Rather than her usual invocation to the moon goddess Selene however, names began to spill from the wizard's lips.

"Amphitrite, Asia, Beroe, Calypso, Ceto, Clio, Clymene, Dione, Eudore, Ianeira, Melite, Neaera..."

January's ears pricked at the name of the continent, and of course at that of Calypso. Then she realized that the cultural anthropologist was not simply reciting names at random. She was recounting the Nereids: female ocean spirits of Ancient Greece. They were a specific type of nymph, or whatever you wanted to call nature spirits in general. Rather than tied to rivers or lakes like others, these were associated specifically with the ocean.

At the same time, January felt the other woman's power reach out into astral space. It was part sonar ping, part siren call across the aether. It traveled out like the ring created by a stone tossed in a pond, and echoed and rebounded off all it came across. In time the signal vanished over the astral horizon, and all went silent within the otherworld once more.

But the call was answered. January felt the force that responded through the higher realm. It existed solely there, a creature of the astral. It raced to them with near blinding speed, and in just moments it stood right beside Silverlight.

Thanks to her recent improvements to her astral sensing, January could feel the newcomer's name. She had the impression that without her recent breakthrough in that ability, she would not have been able to do so. That had been the case with the elementals she had faced months ago at Jobbie Nooner and Montserrat. Now however, it was plain to January that this was Neaera, and that she was definitely feminine in nature.

January felt the spirit's energy sort of undulate. She had no real way of describing the change that traveled through the higher being's aura. With it Neaera shifted from the astral, and ground down to the physical world. It was just as Silverlight had explained in her recent lecture. The elemental could inhabit one world or the other, and step between them at will.

At first the Nereid was a slightly lighter, brighter patch of water amongst that which surrounded them. Then January was able to make out a pair of ocean blue eyes amidst the radiance. That light shrank down, and finally coalesced into the form of a curvy woman clad in white robes that flowed about her like the sea itself. Granted, January suspected that was literally the case.

She could feel the power that rolled off Neaera. Her energy whispered thoughts of gentle currents and the patter of rain. She was the glassy surface of a calm sea, the violent crash of waves against the shore, the rolls of high swells within a storm, and the greedy tug of an undertow. She was the sea itself, possessed of will and power and magic.

But the feeling of spellbound awe and wonder that the summoning had engendered within January—and she suspected the others as well—was broken when Hwarang's voice rang out across the mind link that joined the thoughts of the heroes as one.

"Whatever you are going to do, do it fast," his mental voice rang with a sense of urgency. "We've got company, lights coming from the west!"

"Damn, the Atomkrieg is here," Calypso cursed. Her frilled head turned from the spirit to the direction that the archer had indicated. "This is going to be a running battle as we try to get the bombs out of here."

"Maybe we just need a little Klingon guile," Cray's gruff, but soft voice was in January's ear. She smiled when he explained what he had in mind...

* * *