Sea Food
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 2622
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The Nautilus was suddenly shaken about and Fred was cast to the floor.
Astra Thessamar fell too, and
lay sprawled by his side. But Arthur held on to an inner railing and kept
his footing. He turned to the
viewing ports that lined the cabin but saw only inky blackness. The murky
depths of coastal rock that
had been seen just moments before had disappeared. The violent rocking did
not abate and Arthur
quickly realized that it was no ocean current that had gripped his ship.
The undersea captain reached out
to a brass tube hanging from the ceiling and pulled it to him. "Gavin!" he
shouted into the tube, "what
can you see?!" Placing the tube to his ear, Arthur received a reply. But
it was not to his liking. "Battle
stations!" he hollered into the tube and then struggled out of the cabin
and down his ship's central
corridor. The Nautilus was still skewing haphazardly, first to the left
and then to the right, and keeping
one's feet beneath oneself was almost impossible.
Fred and Astra had no idea what was happening. But Astra was sure that they were all going to die. Humankind was not meant to voyage beneath Ocean's mighty waves. Fred on the other hand was too preoccupied with trying to keep his lunch down to worry about things like dying. Arthur finally reached the pilot house and climbed up into it. He immediately demanded a report. He was told that, at least for now, the Nautilus had not taken on water and there had been no casualties. Thankful for that much, Arthur stared out of the view ports but the scene before him was the same blackness as he'd seen from the forward cabin. But while the front of the ship was mired in that unexplained darkness, the ship's aft windows were completely unobscured. And the propellers were still operating normally, although uselessly since all attempts to free the ship by powering it in reverse had failed. This meant that whatever it was that had snared them had only taken hold of the forward section of the ship. "Have there been any more sightings?" Arthur asked his first officer. Gavin shook his head, "Not since Johnson and Rayner reported in. But do you think what they saw, I mean, it just can't be possible!" Arthur opened his mouth to answer but he was suddenly sent crashing to the floor. His shoulder smashed into the side bulkhead and a gash was cut above his brow. Wiping the blood from his eyes he stared at the starboard windows. They were cracking and the metal plates around them were twisted and bent. But that wasn't the worst thing Arthur saw. Uh-uh. The worst thing that Arthur saw as his eyes darted from porthole to porthole across half the circumference of the pilot house was the whitish-grey tentacle that was pressed up against the glass.
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WolfRun
6/10/2000 10:40:47 PM
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