Stormwreck
"I need the... use of your abilities, my friend." Cried a voice in the whirlwind.
"I sell not to those that bargain with... emotional values." Another wheezed, "My wares are bought by... other means. Means that... I am afraid you cannot possibly afford."
"I have contacted you for eons... surely that is token enough for my... worthiness?"
"I am afraid what you once possessed... isn't worthy of buying my... services."
"I should have thought such... But I do not seek your main merchandise. That Freeman can be kept on... ice, if you will. Send me... what you can, and I will pay... as much as I can pay."
"I will attempt this... as an investment, of course... I will agree to this deal."
"Thank you."
***
Shane Tariyani
Wandering through the wilderness between Combine cities never gets boring.
Where you are, you could care less. Hopefully, Mexico. The bleached pink of the desert sunset looms overhead the carcass of a world long fallen. But this desert could be in Mexico as much as Canada, with the pace the deserts are expanding at.
Still, a lot of the desert is new. The noble cacti of North America have been dying lately, due to some Xenian fungus. In their place, great living tentacles of Xenian flora have grown. No one walks here anymore, except you. The bones of trespassers litter the sands of those who would threaten the territory of the tentacles. Hoping to study them, you’ve drifted across the sandy expanse for a timeless period. Months? Years? Who knows. At least you haven’t seen Combine.
That’s what makes this evening special. You were very thirsty, and Kaniy, your hound-eye, is lame and waiting for water. Hopping on your rusty bicycle you make your way to firmer ground, and luckily, find some tracks. Probably Combine. The sunset darkens as you ride over the crest of a hill… right into a Combine encampment.
Radio gurgling meets your ears after an eon of silence in the desert, satisfying some primal urge to hear communication. You stop your bike, and sneak up behind a Combine APC where you spot four gasmask-faced men working on some piece of machinery. It appears to be a vehicle of some sort, though with your current position you can see little. You also see that they have set up for the night, you assume, and just around the APC you find a stack of bags… filled with water and some kind of floury foodstuff. Before you can think correctly, you snatch the end of one of these bags and pull it off the stack to keep for your own. Its much heavier than you thought.
The water container falls to the ground, and thankfully it doesn’t open. It still makes a noise.
“Sound detected.” You can hear over the radio gurgling of the Combine soldiers.
“Xen hostiles may be in range.”
“2092, make a check of the vicinity.”
“Over, continue repairs on the sled.”
Suddenly, perhaps by radio transmission, the floodlights appear on the APC, illuminating the whole campsite. The shadow of a Combine soldier advances to your position, hiding behind the APC. There is no way he won’t see you. Leaning up against the vehicle, the Combine doesn’t even expect you when he turns the corner. You grab his neck with your hive gun, and blast five hornets through his armor, and with the other hand pull him behind the vehicle, hoping for stealth. However, the radio in his helmet buzzes with the flatline of death.
“Hostile! Spread out, shoot to kill.” You hear from the other side of the APC. Three Combine make their way to deal your death. Their shadows betray them running around the corner of the APC to find you waiting…
R.J. MacReady
Where do you live? Everywhere, it seems. You don’t really know where you are, it’s so hard to identify the old places of Earth anymore. The rest of the Resistance around this area think that it might be Florida, but you don’t put too much trouble to check. Your days are spent hiding. Hiding from the hurricanes of the Stormlands. The tempest always rages. Leaks have to be patched up, flooded areas pumped out, food scavenged from the nearby blasted cities, and so forth.
You are something of a legend in the small territory that you have contact with. A guru, they call you, who holds secrets that make men into warriors worthy to fight the Combine. This reputation has helped you. In the giant multi-roomed basement of what once might have been a mansion, titled the Temple by nearby residents, you wait. They bring you food and tools, help you fix a door or pump out an area, and you teach them the ways of survival in this harsh world. The Temple has become the stronghold of the area, and Resistance members drop in weapons and supplies frequently. But they leave you as the sole resident, a sort of groundskeeper and master that is not to be disturbed.
Until now.
“This buggerin’ hurricane is unreal!” Sergeant Moresly yells over the storm, standing at your doorstep, “The compound some of my boys and their family were staying at is flooded, the wind tore the roof right off. The old steel mill is burning, the bloody storm toppled some of their equipment, caused a fire. Its… bad times, Mr. MacReady, we gotta bunker up with you.”
Outside, in ferocious night waits a crowd behind the Sergeant. Soldiers, wives, children… survivors. They might be more trouble than they are worth, the drain has been plugged up again, and nearly half of the Temple flooded. It has been a bad night.
Before you can say anything, people start coming in from the second entrance. Seeing this, Sergeant Moresly pushes in as well. Your authority has disappeared, as the young Sergeant starts organizing. There are even children around, the runner-rats that parents helped escape the northern cities before they were sent to Citadels for what they called Required Tutelage. They help put down tarps and usher in supplies, but they are dirty and they cause trouble often, in your experience. It will not be a good night.
The women sleep while the men attempt to earn their stay by fixing the Temple’s drain system. It is a mechanical operation that you don’t understand too well. Finally, the flooded rooms become dry once more and the water flows out.
Then you hear a sound you thought you wouldn’t hear for the rest of your lifetime in the Stormlands. The whirring of chopper blades.
“What is that?” Some of the kids cry. They have not heard it before.
Then there is an explosion that rocks the basement Temple, breaking windows. You fall to your back, and the lights go out.
Running to the door, you peer into the tempest. Firelight reaches your eyes from down the rubble-strewn street. And there, a still whirring Combine copter.
Derreck Jones
The streets were flooded by a foot of water.
You knock on a steel door. It opens, and a tall dark Jamaican points a pistol at your face.
He puts it down, “Ah, mon, sorry bout dat. Hey, get in here, right now.”
You had wanted to spend the night there, one of the bigger compounds, Santiago Central, where fresh water and a good night could be spent. It was one of the buildings in a Jamaican military base that had withstood the Seven Hours War. They owed you a lot of favors after they required so much of your assistance getting it set up. You are flabbergasted by this behavior; they must be very edgy for some reason.
“We are… well, mon, currently in a bad situation.” Your guide tells you, a man by the nickname of Boxer. He leads you passed the kitchen and supply room, and you notice everyone is moving very quickly.
“Everyting is hap’ning at once, you know, mon? When it rains, it sure as hell pours.” He laughs crazily, “This typhoon is drowning us, for one ting, half of this base flooded. Second, our scouts spotted something over the radar, in the water. Do you realize this? Combine signals… underwater! No trouble yet… but it doesn’t look good. Third, we have a rescue mission on our hands.”
Boxer opens a door and you walk out to the helipad and jump in the Elizabeth, the sole working Resistance helicopter in Jamaica. Several more dark soldiers wait inside. Before questions can be answered (“We don’t have enough time!”) You are soon flown out to a flooded dock, where through the storm you can see a modified yacht waiting.
“We are going on a trip, my friend.” Boxer grins. “I am glad you came, you are the perfect man. We need your help to identify a factory in Cuba, I believe it belongs to you, in fact. Did you do canning in Cuba? Well, I am glad. Because we have reports that Vortigaunts are hiding out in it. We’ve heard that they’ve sided with some of the Resistance in California, so they must be good news. Sounds fun?”
An inflated boat with a motor in the back whirrs over to your place on the side of the dock. You jump out of the helicopter onto it, to be ferried over to the yacht some distance away. Why you are doing this you have no idea, though it might be because of Boxer’s forceful personality.
“This will be a cruise, boys! You got the easy mission!” Boxer yells, riding at the front of the plastic boat. Then, the water erupts around you, and the boat is tossed upward, throwing you out. You manage to catch the sight of an Ichthyosaur, jaws enclosed around Boxer’s struggling body, when it submerges under the dark, storm-whipped water. You and about a dozen Resistance soldiers fight to stay on the surface, almost halfway to the vessel. The waves are high and continuing to build.
Leon Highwind
It’s a wet morning when you wake up. The mist can never be stopped getting into your underground home. Before you can even eat breakfast (what, oatmeal again?) there is a loud knock on the door.
You open it. You are greeted by pouring rain and wind.
“Hey, Highwind, just a… thought you might want to know… I’ve been working on that radar set and I think I found something near the Bridge.” Says a voice known as Mordo. He’s a lad hooked on your magic, but a worthy follower. He may be the only technician on the island, and has since been able to jury rig a sort of radar device at his place. No doubt, any discovery he makes is sent directly to you, and he hopes that he can get a little bit more of your wares, however quick they are dwindling.
Soon you find yourself in the basement Mordo lurked, instead of the Community Compound at the center of the island. Other than a bed, the entire place was littered with odd electrical tools. You sit down on his bed, bored already of whatever Mordo could show you.
“Check this out, Highwind.” He hefts the radar set onto his mattress, and flips a switch.
BLEEP. BLEEP.
Something was out there, and big. The radar set showed a green image of the surrounding area, up to twenty miles, easily encompassing the island. The island had a peninsula, incredibly long and very narrow, a sandbar more than anything that stretched out beyond the horizon. The Bridge, it was titled, and the townspeople kept it as dry as possible in hopes that a traveling aircraft would use it as a runway. But with the tempest that raged all day and all night, the chance of such happening was nill. Now, something… big was lying out right beside the Bridge.
“It could be anything, Leon. Alien, or maybe a Resistance ship, or a drifting barge, or maybe even a bunch of rubble. Might be interesting, though. The hurricane tosses up the strangest things.” Mordo declares.
Over the wind you hear the rattle of machine guns.
“Did you hear that?” Mordo asks, suddenly alert.
You grab your Magnum.
Stefan Najdecki
Tonight is not a good night.
Hurricane Zeta? Is it? And already it must be the beginning of summer. No one recorded the hurricanes any more. They were frequent, loud, and powerful. This one, though, was particularly cruel. The residence you have stayed in for the last few weeks has been okay, to say the least. A hold of Resistance soldiers, escapees from City 3, hoping to lead a revolution in the urban center in the future. Particularly, they were interested in your forging of metal weapons, weapons that could be concealed easily and spread throughout the citizenry to prepare for a wide scale attack.
So you had spent your days taking scrap metal and making weapons. It was a good learning experience. Returning home after a night of scavenging, however, you find the entire place flooded up to the surface. Your mates are no where to be found.
The wind is picked up, and the rain feels like bullets on your back. It should start hailing soon, if you know anything about storm. With your raincoat secured, and a makeshift blade in your hand, you make your way through the rubble of a city whose name had been forgotten. Tampa? Memphis? Jacksonville? You hadn’t been able to tell. Somewhere in Florida, definitely.
Something flies overhead. You leap for the ground, splashing into a deep puddle, as you hear the whirring of copter blades. Suddenly, there is an explosion only a few feet from you, the water erupts into the air and is blown away.
Then another explosion, huge, and a shockwave that blows you backward. Now your clothes are soaked, and you get up, frantic. To your right you gaze down the street and see something burning, even in the rain. It would be put out soon. A gust of wind pushes you forward, and you stumble right upon some kind of canister, immersed in water. It is large, waist high, of black metal, and vaguely familiar.
Suddenly, it opens, and you hear the screech of headcrabs. You step back and unsheathe your sword, and about a dozen headcrabs climb out of the canister. As if things could get worse.
Tim Barratt
You had never witnesses Jamaica as a monster.
In your basement hide away, everything was going fine when your roof was torn off by the hurricane. Staring up into the tempest, it was only second until the wind grabbed you and pulled you up.
It was the most spectacular experience, though you remember little. You must have gone nearly a hundred feet into the air, carried literally by the powerful wind of the hurricane. Debris tore at your skin, but you were lucky. Suddenly, you were falling, no longer flying.
Splash! Into the ocean.
“Man overboard!” You hear a cry. You can’t breathe; the wind is knocked out of you. You can’t move your limbs, you are almost paralyzed. Soon you are being hefted up a rope ladder, onto some kind of ship. You black out.
Awakening, you see people running all around you. You are on a ship. You lived right next to the docks, it isn’t surprise that you are on a ship, and by the looks of it, Jamaica Resistance’s battle-yacht, the Elizabeth II. You’ve seen it once or twice. You struggle to get up, and, breathing hard, you throw up over the rails. The ship is crashing into waves all around her, and the deck goes up and down like a violent teeter-totter.
“Icthyosaur!” You hear a scream. You gaze out over the watery black of the ocean, and catch the glimpse of some huge fleshy mass moving underneath the waves. And, to make matters worse, it seems like a mass of a dozen people are out there, floating in the water. How they got there you are not sure, maybe they were flung by the wind as you were.
However, they are at the mercy of the alien behemoth underneath the waves, now. The crew of the ship is panicking.
"I need the... use of your abilities, my friend." Cried a voice in the whirlwind.
"I sell not to those that bargain with... emotional values." Another wheezed, "My wares are bought by... other means. Means that... I am afraid you cannot possibly afford."
"I have contacted you for eons... surely that is token enough for my... worthiness?"
"I am afraid what you once possessed... isn't worthy of buying my... services."
"I should have thought such... But I do not seek your main merchandise. That Freeman can be kept on... ice, if you will. Send me... what you can, and I will pay... as much as I can pay."
"I will attempt this... as an investment, of course... I will agree to this deal."
"Thank you."
***
Shane Tariyani
Wandering through the wilderness between Combine cities never gets boring.
Where you are, you could care less. Hopefully, Mexico. The bleached pink of the desert sunset looms overhead the carcass of a world long fallen. But this desert could be in Mexico as much as Canada, with the pace the deserts are expanding at.
Still, a lot of the desert is new. The noble cacti of North America have been dying lately, due to some Xenian fungus. In their place, great living tentacles of Xenian flora have grown. No one walks here anymore, except you. The bones of trespassers litter the sands of those who would threaten the territory of the tentacles. Hoping to study them, you’ve drifted across the sandy expanse for a timeless period. Months? Years? Who knows. At least you haven’t seen Combine.
That’s what makes this evening special. You were very thirsty, and Kaniy, your hound-eye, is lame and waiting for water. Hopping on your rusty bicycle you make your way to firmer ground, and luckily, find some tracks. Probably Combine. The sunset darkens as you ride over the crest of a hill… right into a Combine encampment.
Radio gurgling meets your ears after an eon of silence in the desert, satisfying some primal urge to hear communication. You stop your bike, and sneak up behind a Combine APC where you spot four gasmask-faced men working on some piece of machinery. It appears to be a vehicle of some sort, though with your current position you can see little. You also see that they have set up for the night, you assume, and just around the APC you find a stack of bags… filled with water and some kind of floury foodstuff. Before you can think correctly, you snatch the end of one of these bags and pull it off the stack to keep for your own. Its much heavier than you thought.
The water container falls to the ground, and thankfully it doesn’t open. It still makes a noise.
“Sound detected.” You can hear over the radio gurgling of the Combine soldiers.
“Xen hostiles may be in range.”
“2092, make a check of the vicinity.”
“Over, continue repairs on the sled.”
Suddenly, perhaps by radio transmission, the floodlights appear on the APC, illuminating the whole campsite. The shadow of a Combine soldier advances to your position, hiding behind the APC. There is no way he won’t see you. Leaning up against the vehicle, the Combine doesn’t even expect you when he turns the corner. You grab his neck with your hive gun, and blast five hornets through his armor, and with the other hand pull him behind the vehicle, hoping for stealth. However, the radio in his helmet buzzes with the flatline of death.
“Hostile! Spread out, shoot to kill.” You hear from the other side of the APC. Three Combine make their way to deal your death. Their shadows betray them running around the corner of the APC to find you waiting…
R.J. MacReady
Where do you live? Everywhere, it seems. You don’t really know where you are, it’s so hard to identify the old places of Earth anymore. The rest of the Resistance around this area think that it might be Florida, but you don’t put too much trouble to check. Your days are spent hiding. Hiding from the hurricanes of the Stormlands. The tempest always rages. Leaks have to be patched up, flooded areas pumped out, food scavenged from the nearby blasted cities, and so forth.
You are something of a legend in the small territory that you have contact with. A guru, they call you, who holds secrets that make men into warriors worthy to fight the Combine. This reputation has helped you. In the giant multi-roomed basement of what once might have been a mansion, titled the Temple by nearby residents, you wait. They bring you food and tools, help you fix a door or pump out an area, and you teach them the ways of survival in this harsh world. The Temple has become the stronghold of the area, and Resistance members drop in weapons and supplies frequently. But they leave you as the sole resident, a sort of groundskeeper and master that is not to be disturbed.
Until now.
“This buggerin’ hurricane is unreal!” Sergeant Moresly yells over the storm, standing at your doorstep, “The compound some of my boys and their family were staying at is flooded, the wind tore the roof right off. The old steel mill is burning, the bloody storm toppled some of their equipment, caused a fire. Its… bad times, Mr. MacReady, we gotta bunker up with you.”
Outside, in ferocious night waits a crowd behind the Sergeant. Soldiers, wives, children… survivors. They might be more trouble than they are worth, the drain has been plugged up again, and nearly half of the Temple flooded. It has been a bad night.
Before you can say anything, people start coming in from the second entrance. Seeing this, Sergeant Moresly pushes in as well. Your authority has disappeared, as the young Sergeant starts organizing. There are even children around, the runner-rats that parents helped escape the northern cities before they were sent to Citadels for what they called Required Tutelage. They help put down tarps and usher in supplies, but they are dirty and they cause trouble often, in your experience. It will not be a good night.
The women sleep while the men attempt to earn their stay by fixing the Temple’s drain system. It is a mechanical operation that you don’t understand too well. Finally, the flooded rooms become dry once more and the water flows out.
Then you hear a sound you thought you wouldn’t hear for the rest of your lifetime in the Stormlands. The whirring of chopper blades.
“What is that?” Some of the kids cry. They have not heard it before.
Then there is an explosion that rocks the basement Temple, breaking windows. You fall to your back, and the lights go out.
Running to the door, you peer into the tempest. Firelight reaches your eyes from down the rubble-strewn street. And there, a still whirring Combine copter.
Derreck Jones
The streets were flooded by a foot of water.
You knock on a steel door. It opens, and a tall dark Jamaican points a pistol at your face.
He puts it down, “Ah, mon, sorry bout dat. Hey, get in here, right now.”
You had wanted to spend the night there, one of the bigger compounds, Santiago Central, where fresh water and a good night could be spent. It was one of the buildings in a Jamaican military base that had withstood the Seven Hours War. They owed you a lot of favors after they required so much of your assistance getting it set up. You are flabbergasted by this behavior; they must be very edgy for some reason.
“We are… well, mon, currently in a bad situation.” Your guide tells you, a man by the nickname of Boxer. He leads you passed the kitchen and supply room, and you notice everyone is moving very quickly.
“Everyting is hap’ning at once, you know, mon? When it rains, it sure as hell pours.” He laughs crazily, “This typhoon is drowning us, for one ting, half of this base flooded. Second, our scouts spotted something over the radar, in the water. Do you realize this? Combine signals… underwater! No trouble yet… but it doesn’t look good. Third, we have a rescue mission on our hands.”
Boxer opens a door and you walk out to the helipad and jump in the Elizabeth, the sole working Resistance helicopter in Jamaica. Several more dark soldiers wait inside. Before questions can be answered (“We don’t have enough time!”) You are soon flown out to a flooded dock, where through the storm you can see a modified yacht waiting.
“We are going on a trip, my friend.” Boxer grins. “I am glad you came, you are the perfect man. We need your help to identify a factory in Cuba, I believe it belongs to you, in fact. Did you do canning in Cuba? Well, I am glad. Because we have reports that Vortigaunts are hiding out in it. We’ve heard that they’ve sided with some of the Resistance in California, so they must be good news. Sounds fun?”
An inflated boat with a motor in the back whirrs over to your place on the side of the dock. You jump out of the helicopter onto it, to be ferried over to the yacht some distance away. Why you are doing this you have no idea, though it might be because of Boxer’s forceful personality.
“This will be a cruise, boys! You got the easy mission!” Boxer yells, riding at the front of the plastic boat. Then, the water erupts around you, and the boat is tossed upward, throwing you out. You manage to catch the sight of an Ichthyosaur, jaws enclosed around Boxer’s struggling body, when it submerges under the dark, storm-whipped water. You and about a dozen Resistance soldiers fight to stay on the surface, almost halfway to the vessel. The waves are high and continuing to build.
Leon Highwind
It’s a wet morning when you wake up. The mist can never be stopped getting into your underground home. Before you can even eat breakfast (what, oatmeal again?) there is a loud knock on the door.
You open it. You are greeted by pouring rain and wind.
“Hey, Highwind, just a… thought you might want to know… I’ve been working on that radar set and I think I found something near the Bridge.” Says a voice known as Mordo. He’s a lad hooked on your magic, but a worthy follower. He may be the only technician on the island, and has since been able to jury rig a sort of radar device at his place. No doubt, any discovery he makes is sent directly to you, and he hopes that he can get a little bit more of your wares, however quick they are dwindling.
Soon you find yourself in the basement Mordo lurked, instead of the Community Compound at the center of the island. Other than a bed, the entire place was littered with odd electrical tools. You sit down on his bed, bored already of whatever Mordo could show you.
“Check this out, Highwind.” He hefts the radar set onto his mattress, and flips a switch.
BLEEP. BLEEP.
Something was out there, and big. The radar set showed a green image of the surrounding area, up to twenty miles, easily encompassing the island. The island had a peninsula, incredibly long and very narrow, a sandbar more than anything that stretched out beyond the horizon. The Bridge, it was titled, and the townspeople kept it as dry as possible in hopes that a traveling aircraft would use it as a runway. But with the tempest that raged all day and all night, the chance of such happening was nill. Now, something… big was lying out right beside the Bridge.
“It could be anything, Leon. Alien, or maybe a Resistance ship, or a drifting barge, or maybe even a bunch of rubble. Might be interesting, though. The hurricane tosses up the strangest things.” Mordo declares.
Over the wind you hear the rattle of machine guns.
“Did you hear that?” Mordo asks, suddenly alert.
You grab your Magnum.
Stefan Najdecki
Tonight is not a good night.
Hurricane Zeta? Is it? And already it must be the beginning of summer. No one recorded the hurricanes any more. They were frequent, loud, and powerful. This one, though, was particularly cruel. The residence you have stayed in for the last few weeks has been okay, to say the least. A hold of Resistance soldiers, escapees from City 3, hoping to lead a revolution in the urban center in the future. Particularly, they were interested in your forging of metal weapons, weapons that could be concealed easily and spread throughout the citizenry to prepare for a wide scale attack.
So you had spent your days taking scrap metal and making weapons. It was a good learning experience. Returning home after a night of scavenging, however, you find the entire place flooded up to the surface. Your mates are no where to be found.
The wind is picked up, and the rain feels like bullets on your back. It should start hailing soon, if you know anything about storm. With your raincoat secured, and a makeshift blade in your hand, you make your way through the rubble of a city whose name had been forgotten. Tampa? Memphis? Jacksonville? You hadn’t been able to tell. Somewhere in Florida, definitely.
Something flies overhead. You leap for the ground, splashing into a deep puddle, as you hear the whirring of copter blades. Suddenly, there is an explosion only a few feet from you, the water erupts into the air and is blown away.
Then another explosion, huge, and a shockwave that blows you backward. Now your clothes are soaked, and you get up, frantic. To your right you gaze down the street and see something burning, even in the rain. It would be put out soon. A gust of wind pushes you forward, and you stumble right upon some kind of canister, immersed in water. It is large, waist high, of black metal, and vaguely familiar.
Suddenly, it opens, and you hear the screech of headcrabs. You step back and unsheathe your sword, and about a dozen headcrabs climb out of the canister. As if things could get worse.
Tim Barratt
You had never witnesses Jamaica as a monster.
In your basement hide away, everything was going fine when your roof was torn off by the hurricane. Staring up into the tempest, it was only second until the wind grabbed you and pulled you up.
It was the most spectacular experience, though you remember little. You must have gone nearly a hundred feet into the air, carried literally by the powerful wind of the hurricane. Debris tore at your skin, but you were lucky. Suddenly, you were falling, no longer flying.
Splash! Into the ocean.
“Man overboard!” You hear a cry. You can’t breathe; the wind is knocked out of you. You can’t move your limbs, you are almost paralyzed. Soon you are being hefted up a rope ladder, onto some kind of ship. You black out.
Awakening, you see people running all around you. You are on a ship. You lived right next to the docks, it isn’t surprise that you are on a ship, and by the looks of it, Jamaica Resistance’s battle-yacht, the Elizabeth II. You’ve seen it once or twice. You struggle to get up, and, breathing hard, you throw up over the rails. The ship is crashing into waves all around her, and the deck goes up and down like a violent teeter-totter.
“Icthyosaur!” You hear a scream. You gaze out over the watery black of the ocean, and catch the glimpse of some huge fleshy mass moving underneath the waves. And, to make matters worse, it seems like a mass of a dozen people are out there, floating in the water. How they got there you are not sure, maybe they were flung by the wind as you were.
However, they are at the mercy of the alien behemoth underneath the waves, now. The crew of the ship is panicking.
