THE
STORY TO THIS POINT:
Freed from
Zanadu’s Chaos amber trap in Lemuria, Aquaman made his lonely
journey across the Pacific, not seeing or sensing any Atlanteans along
the way. In a case of mistaken identity, he was attacked by
the Argentine Navy before being recovered from the ocean by a OGRE
owned ship and helicoptered to a navy base, just in time for an attack
by an armored terrorist and OGRE employee in Atlantean Cuttlefish
combat armor. Before his defeat, the Cuttlefish intimated
that Atlantis was gone and vultures were picking over the bones of
Atlantis.
Aquaman rocketed northward
through the Mid-Atlantic. He, only, altered course twice, once to
push a Canadian container ship with a fouled rudder toward assistance,
and again to rescue a foundering dolphin caught in a tuna net. He
pulled the identifying markers from the net and vowed to put it in the
hands of regulators who could do something about it.
He swam in past the outer markers of Poseidonis. From here he
should have been able to see the Hy-Brasilian refugee camp* filled with the survivors
of the Akisaqtuq’s nuclear attack, only it stood empty like every
city, town, and settlement he had passed on his way here.
*Hy-Brasil fell to nuclear fire
and Akisaqtuq’s revenge in JLU Aquaman #10.
Past the camp, he swam over the newer outer boroughs of
Poseidonis. He approached the walls of the old city.
Roughly a mile in circumference, the old city wall encompassed the old
city with the High Wall on its inside and Wall Street outside.
The wall had tumbled in a few places. Pouring on the speed,
Aquaman shot over the wall and out over the...crater where the old city
used to be. It looked, surprisingly, like the crater that marked
where Thierna Na Oge used to stand. But while Thierna looked to
have been disintegrated leaving a seemingly bottomless crater, the
Poseidonis crater seemed to have been scooped out and cleaved from the
seabed. From just inside the old city wall, the entire old city
was gone, the Palace, the Parliament, all of it.
He slowed as he neared the center. He allowed himself to float in
a circle, scanning out to the limits of his seaborne sight.
Poseidonis was a ghost town with the center cut out. It was
empty, desolate, deserted. Closing his eyes, he reached out with
his senses, feeling the ocean.
Only the quiet answered him.
His people were gone, not just here, but everywhere.
He reached for his JLA communicator, a second before remembering the
lack of a carrier wave from the Watchtower. He glanced around at
the empty city and sea. His gaze slid upward staring at the
distant surface world...and the even more distant Moon.
“Mighty Poseidon, what in Hades happened while I was
gone?”
The sound of stones collapsing echoed through the water. A moment
later, he heard the sounds of turbine propellers and other
machinery. Kicking his legs, Aquaman raced toward the
sound. As he reached the edge of the crater, the machine sounds
faded away. He slowed trying to regain his bearings.
He crossed into one of the old aristocratic neighborhoods.
Aquaman swam slowly as he swept over the Boulevard of Kings, using his
undersea hearing and other senses to reach out, straining to find the
location of the sounds.
Near the Boulevard, the Atlantean government had erected a statue
honoring him for all his service, at Vulko’s insistence,
supposedly to bring he and the people closer to one another. How
the statues, the parades, and honorariums from his reign as King and
his time with S.W.O.R.D. were supposed to bring him and the people
closer eluded him.
The beheaded statue lay across the road blocking it. Debris from
a crumbled section of the old city wall had fallen across the
statue’s base and legs. His eyes drifted from the
statue’s broken neck to the stump of his hand and back. It
was a bit disquieting that the head was no where to be seen.
Ahead, the Vulko family tower loomed. The brick facade of the
ancient keep shattered. Debris littered the crushed garden around the
base of the tower. A deep sea submersible with a claw arm sat on
the seabed facing the hole in the tower. Lights from inside the
sub illuminated the innards of the tower. Shadows at the
DSV’s portholes showed movement inside the vehicle.
Aquaman approached slowly from dead astern. He noted the
Sunderland Corporation logo on the small conning tower. Aquaman
slowed to a stop. His fingers hovering just over the logo.
“Those bastards,” he thought. The only thing
that surprised him was that there wasn’t a Merrevale Oil
submersible alongside this scavenger helping it pick over the empty
city.
The sub’s robotic arm reached into the rubble beyond the tower
wall. An attenuated voice echoed through the water to
Aquaman. “I’ve got the object that was broadcasting
the signal. Looks to be more of those memory crystals. This
one’s active though. Quantum signature doesn’t match
anything we’ve seen before. This could be the mother
loa...”
At the mention of the Scabbard, the Atlantean military and the
S.W.O.R.D. program HQ, Aquaman landed on DSV’s spine behind the
conning tower. The sub’s glass portholes faced forward
hiding the sea king from the conning tower’s viewports. He
stood there a second letting his weight settle, tipping the sub’s
balance backward on it’s axis. As the station keeping
motors kicked in, Aquaman stepped toward the tail of the sub, forcing
its stern down and its bow up. As the memory crystal came within
reach, he snatched it. The robotic arm’s gyros flailed
about trying to regain their balance.
In the sub, the three men clamped their hands over their ears.
The sea king’s voice exploded through the interior atmosphere of
the sub. Reverberating whale song fashion, Aquaman roared,
“YOU DON’T BELONG HERE.”
The external speaker on the sub activated as their cameras spun to see
who was attacking them. “We’ve got as much right to
salvage as anyone.”
“Not anymore. Atlantis isn’t available for
salvage,” he responded. He grabbed the sub by its
arm. He grimaced as his muscles tautened. With a groan, he
swung the submarine around slamming it against the sea floor.
PING! SPRUNG! TOOF! Water leaks rained in on the crew of
the submersible.
Letting the arm go, Aquaman floated before the DSV’s
viewports. He stared in at the three crewmen. At that
moment, they were sure he meant to let them drown.
“Topo, see our guests to the surface.” A huge
tentacle settled around the Sutherland Corp submarine. The subs
engines kicked in trying to pull away. Topo’s tentacle
tightened causing the already compromised hull to creak.
The pilot’s jaw dropped open as he got a good look at Topo.
He ramped the engines up to full. “No way.”
The crewmen shuffled around inside the sub trying to see out the small
portholes at what had ahold of them. “It’s a 60 foot
octopus,” the pilot explained incredulously. “Maybe
65. I’m...” he swallowed heavily as the hull creaked again,
“I’m shutting the engines down.”
Topo dragged the submersible clear of Poseidonis and upward toward the
distant surface. The DSV’s hull popping at the pressure
changes and the enormous grip of the octopus.
Aquaman called out with his telepathy. “Thank you, old
friend.”
“As you desire, my king,” the octopus’s deep mental
voice answered him as he tossed the injured DSV from tentacle to
tentacle, much to the chagrin of the people aboard.
Dropping the memory crystal into a net pouch and attaching it to his
belt, Aquaman rose upward. As he shallowed, he turned a slow
circle looking out over the city. The large circular crater
dominated Poseidonis. The elegant old city gouged from the center
with only the newer, less artistic, constructions remaining. The
heart of the city truly was missing.
Angling across the ghostly, empty expanse of Poseidonis, he descended
toward the Scabbard. The high tech headquarters of all of
Atlantis’s military orders and her intelligence services, lay
toppled on its side. The building showed signs of having been
felled from the inside by carefully placed explosive charges. He
tasted the molique residue in the water around the structure.
Molique explosives were used exclusively by Atlantean Special
Forces. Whoever did this hadn’t wanted the building to fall
into enemy hands intact.
Diving through the partially destroyed structure, Arthur found the
computer core. The debris pattern showed that someone had picked
through what was left, which wasn’t much. One of the
molique bombs had made a mess of the core. The dead and shattered
memory crystals of the giant super computer that ran the Scabbard lay
everywhere. He swam into the normally closed off inner processing
nucleus of the system. The so-called Brain of Atlantis was silent
and dead. “But, even with this much destruction,” he
thought. He spun around quickly. His hand and stump went
out to search through the sand, detritus, and debris on the floor of
the chamber. The Brain’s central stem was gone.
“One more thing to worry about,” he thought as he swam
slowly through the rest of the mostly destroyed complex. Passing
his quarters, he slowed. The door to his quarters lay across the
threshold. His brow creased as he noticed all his things were
missing. Heaving the door aside, he swam into the room. The
picture on the bedside of he, Mera, and Arthur JR was missing.
The little things...the memorabilia of a life were missing.
Things that unless you knew they were supposed to be there, you
wouldn’t notice. As he turned back toward the partially
collapsed entrance to the room, he saw a note stuck to the door.
Written in an all but forgotten dialect of ancient Atlantean which he
and Vulko used as a secret code, the note read, “My knig, I hpoe
tihs fndis you wlel. I lfet an epalxnoaitn and a gfit for you in yuor
old cvae hunat. Broefe you go tehre, rveietre the mmroey ctsyarl form
my flmaiy teowr. Tehre is iofntimraon on tehm taht you wlil need
in the cnmoig days. As aylwas, yuor aevdisr and layol sjbcuet,
Vulko.”
Arthur fingered the crystal in the net pouch depending from his
belt. It still hummed with power. “Well,” he
said, “at least I know what you are now.”
Swimming out from the wreckage of the Scabbard, he set course toward
the original ancient city of Atlantis. Abandoned in some distant
forgotten time, the city that Plato described still existed as
ruins. She was the birthplace of modern Atlantean culture...of
most of the intelligent undersea life extant in the oceans of the
world. Through the odd mix of magic and science that Atlantis
always excelled at, she had populated the oceans. The
Poseidonians, Hy-Brasilians, Tritonians, Tiernans, and all the other
subsea races were born there in the postdiluvian world, the apocalypse
where old Atlantis had left the surface world for the land of myth and
legend.
Arthur and Garth made their headquarters near the Old City when they
were first starting out. The Aquacave stood inside a mountainous
rock formation near the old city. From an opening in the rock,
high in the cave, he could look out across the ruins of the old city,
contemplating the world, the future, the past, life, and everything in
it.
As he swam over the Atlantis that Plato had described millenia ago, he
saw what all of Atlantis, both young and ancient, shared now, deserted
ruins...home to ghosts...feed for scavengers.
It had been years since Aquaman visited his cave. When he was a
younger man, with Garth by his side, the place seemed open, warm, and
inviting. Now, it seemed small and dark. His last visit was
just before his first encounter with Koryak* and the Sher’hedeen.
*Koryak first appeared in
mainstream DCU’s Aquaman Vol 5 #5 (January 1995)
He approached the grotto where the Aquacave’s entrance went deep
into the mountain. The ruins of the ancient city climbed a small
mountain range. From his vantage point, he could make out Mount
Cleito* in the city
center, supposedly carved by Poseidon in ancient times. Before he
actually met Poseidon, he thought that was just a myth. The
concentric carved ring moats laid out in a mosaic around the
mountain. Some of the ancient bridges and causeways still stood
across the moats. Some were tumbled down in ruin and
rubble. The city’s outer ring curled much further out from
the city, cutting through the next mountain out from Cleito.
Where this moat ring reached the center of the mountain, Arthur and
Garth discovered an entrance to a cave that they would claim as their
own.
*Mount Cleito is part and
parcel of Plato’s description of Atlantis. The mountain named
after Poseidon’s wife.
He swam through the pre-Grecian columned ruins. He passed through
the shadows of the large guardian colossi statues that stood in pairs
alongside each of the city gates. As the ruins fell away and the
craggy mountain rose, he found his entrance hidden below a shelf of
rock.
If you didn’t know where the crevice began, you wouldn’t
find it. Arthur and Garth had discovered it quite by
accident. The only others they ever told about it were Mera and
Vulko.
Once through, into the cave proper, it widened out, opening up into a
large series of chambers. Some of the caverns were natural.
Some were hollowed out by unknown hands in a bygone era. And,
Garth and Arthur opened up some of them after they moved in.
His long absence showed noticeably. Sludge and muck gathered in
the low places fouling the water. The crags of the ceiling and
the walls had become homes to eels and various crustaceans.
A popping sound echoed in the musty chamber as the old motion sensitive
chemical lights came up. The lights came on in sequence deeper
into the cave revealing Aquaman’s old home one chamber at a time.
Just beyond the tight entrance, the cavern opened into a wide
gallery. From this position, he could see into the residential
cavern, storage, labs, monitor room, and the trophy chamber.
Beyond these chambers stood a long series of caverns filled with
stalactites and stalagmites. He and Garth had raced through these
tight chambers using the natural growths as obstacles, improving their
skills and speed in the water.
His brows rose. A collection of gear in net bags sat on the far
side of the chamber near his old sleeping quarters. Glancing
through the bags’ contents, he realized these were the items from
his quarters in the Scabbard.
A flashing red light drew his attention to the monitor/computer
cavern. It was in worse shape than the rest of the
Aquacave. The computers showed their age and a layer of slime,
probably from a hive of sea slugs. Incongruously, a shiny new
Atlantean computer core dominated the otherwise dilapidated room.
The red flashing standby status light were what had drawn his
attention.
“A little bit of leading me by my nose, aren’t you,
Vulko?” He said to the ether of the empty cave, laying his
hand on the new core’s crystal reader slot.
Pulling the net pouch from his belt, he slipped the active memory
crystal from the bag and inserted it into the computer slot. The
sound of the crystal spooling up filled the chamber. A light
glowed inside the crystal. Symbols and sigils flashed through the
deep structure of the crystal. An infinity symbol settled into
the crystal’s heart. “That’s not normal,”
he murmured leaning forward. The infinity symbol blurred spinning
into a new design. When it resolved itself, an ancient Atlantean
mystical rune floated in the crystal. A bewildered look crossed
Aquaman’s face.
“What are yo...”
FA-ZOOM! Blue lightning tinged with white cracked out striking
Aquaman’s brow. His feet floated up off the floor.
His body convulsed as the energy poured out of the crystal. The
blue lightning held him, pouring into his eyes.
As the light from the heart of the crystal died, the energy tether
connecting him to it faded away. Aquaman floated unconscious and
still in the light currents of the Aquacave.
He dreamed.
He stood in the dark. Bright teal lines of light spiderwebbed the
whole of his field of vision. Green lens flares lit the corners
of his field of vision causing him to squint. The green glare
shifted their positions around his eye line. A globe of gray,
slowly, grew directly in front of him. Features resolved into a
giant face, a woman’s face, bald, wide forehead, aquiline
nose. The skin shifted from gray, pixellating light lines in
green and blue, millions of them, making up the skin, capillary
like. The eyes opened. Orange pools of fiery energy stared
at Aquaman’s dream self.
He looked down at his hands...both of his hands. He flexed
them. For a dream, they sure felt real. He, briefly, caught
sight of his image in a silvery peal of wave. He looked 10 years
younger.
The face spoke. “I am a spark of the Brain of
Atlantis. I am the mystical computer interface filled with the
complete knowledge of Atlantis. I am the liquid brain of the
super computer that once controlled Poseidonis, the last vestige of the
Atlantean Empire. I was left behind for my King to find.
Provided you are Orin of Atlantis, this spark is downloading all the
learning and history of Atlantis into your brain.”
Beyond the dream, Aquaman’s body still floated held aloft in the
nearly still waters of the Aquacave.
The dream voice continued. “Vulko left me behind to serve
you. You will need to expand the computing power here in the
Aquacave. I am only able to partially activate through this
crystal reader. Once you have sufficient computing power here in
the Aquacave, you will be able to transfer me out of your brain and
back into the systems. Until them, I will exist within you, expanding
and deepening your knowledge. I won’t be able to speak with
you or directly interact with you beyond a trance meditation state or
when you are asleep until I’m downloaded into an adequate
hardware system. I was tight beamed to the crystal where you
found me in the final moments before Poseidonis followed the other
cities. But another wishes to explain that to
you...” The voice trailed off.
The dream image of the Brain of Atlantis faded. His body settled
to the ground as the information feeding into his brain released him.
He blinked. His head felt heavy on his neck. Instinctively,
he knew that the knowledge that the Brain of Atlantis had downloaded
into his brain was only metaphorically heavy, but, still heavy in its
own right.
He blinked again and a ghostly image of Nudis Vulko stood before him,
short and doughy in body, possessed of the presence of a true
leader. He wore the blue suit that he had, more or less, adopted
as the uniform of the First Citizen of Atlantis, their prime minister
and leader. Arthur noticed that Vulko’s image was wearing a
sash with an ornate button on it. He recognized the button.
Arthur had only seen the design in the Atlantean Chronicles. It
was worn by the ultimate leader of all Atlantis and Atlanteans.
It was a relic of the time when all the city-states and the many tribes
of the sea were unified.
“My king,” his virtual avatar greeted Arthur with a
bow. “By now, you know that Atlantis and all her people
have gone.” His voice sounded tired, weary. “A
plague broke out among our people not long after you departed. It
started in the refugee camps and quickly spread throughout the
populace. The Scientists Guild determined that it started as a
result of the odious amount of refuse and worse that the surface world
continues to rain down on us. The disease was mutating faster
than we could hope to find a cure. If we were to survive, we had
to take radical steps. After much hand wringing and arguing, we
enacted the ancient evacuation protocols and separated the cities from
their anchorages. Though where we would evacuate to was a
question of much debate and consternation. If you are watching
this...” he trailed off. The image of Vulko raised his hand
and massaged his left temple before rubbing his eyes and pinching the
bridge of his nose.
“The decision was made in a Parliament of the Oceans,” when
he spoke that title, he absently fingered the sash and pin.
“We decided that our only hope was to take all of Atlantis, all
of our people, and transit through the Thierna na Oge crater, the Hole
Between Worlds, out into the wider multiverse beyond and seek a watery
world where we could make a new Atlantis...a new home for all
Atlantis’ children.”
“We’re going to attempt,” he trailed off. He
looked into the recording device. His lips set in a grim
line. “I’m going to leave a trail for you to follow
so that you may rejoin us. I pray this finds you alive and well.
My king,” he paused and looked away for a moment.
When he went on, the timber of his voice had changed.
“Arthur, there are things we never talked about. Things
that should have been said. I’ve allowed my family line to
wither. I am the last son of the line of Vulko.
You...” the image of Vulko swallowed. “I will watch
for you. I will try to get messages to you when possible.
Come home to Atlantis. Come home to me, my son.”
Vulko’s image faded away.
His connection to the Brain of Atlantis told him what happened
next. In his mind’s eye, he saw Poseidonis lining up for
her run through the Hole Between Worlds. Poseidonis was the last
city to make transit into the beyond. As she passed the event
horizon, he felt the Brain’s data being flashed to the storage
crystals in Vulko’s family tower.
Arthur shook his head, feeling his dream self reassert over his
consciousness. Slowly, another form faded into view. Mera
stood before him. Her long flowing red hair and fair skin stirred
something deep inside him. Maybe here in this dreamscape, old
memories were closer to the surface and the emotions that moved along
with them. He smirked realizing he was fooling himself. He
still loved her. More than he could have admitted to himself the
last few years.
Mera’s dream image spoke. “Arthur, I chose not to
go. I’m waiting for you at our old place in
Florida.” She faded from view.
The buzzing energized thought of the last half hour slowly faded
out. He floated down, drifting to the floor of the
Aquacave. And he slept for the first time, really slept, since
leaving the Lemurian Chaos shell where Zanadu had trapped him and Arion
over a year ago.
BZZZZZ! BZZZZ! Aquaman fought his way upward through layers
of unconsciousness. When he opened his eyes, a blue glow suffused
their depths. The glow slowly faded from his eyes as he blinked
his way toward wakefulness.
In those moments, he realized that Vulko and the Brain’s gift
were more than he could have imagined. He knew everything about
Atlantis, ancient and modern. There were sciences, histories, and
the whole of Atlantis at the reach of his thoughts. He knew
Atlantis in a way that he never had before.
Looking down, he could feel the phantom hand, but it wasn’t
there. All that was there was his badly wrapped stump. He
concentrated and a hard water construct in the shape of his hand
formed. He reached toward the sandy ocean floor and sand flowed
up and his hand became formed sand.
He stared at his hand, flexing it.
BZZZZZ! The stylized A on his belt buzzed again for his
attention. He touched the center of the A activating his JLA
communicator. “This is Aquaman.”
“Arthur...it’s good to hear from you. We had feared
the worst. I saw that you activated one of the old
circuits.”
Checking the metadata on his communicator, Aquaman frowned.
“I couldn’t get a carrier wave from the Watchtower.
And, I notice that you aren’t on the Moon?”
Batman took a deep breath. “The Watchtower is gone. A
lot has changed on the surface over the last year. ...in
Atlantis?”
Thinking of the empty cities with the craters in their centers, Arthur
answered. “A lot has changed down here as well.”
“You need to come in Arthur. There are things that need
discussing. And a laundry list of events you need to be apprised
of.”
“I’m on my way.”
Batman flipped a switch in the Monitor Womb. “You should be
receiving an open teleport signal...now.”
“I’ll be with you in a few moments.” Aquaman
triggered the reciprocal for the teleportal signal and, almost
immediately, he felt the teleporter effect grab him.
Aquaman stood on the transporter pad in the Keep. The room was
empty, except for an unmanned control console. The door to the
chamber slid open. Batman’s voice came through the public
address system. “Take a right in the hallway. The
elevator at the end of the hall will bring you to the Monitor
Womb.”
Something was off about the place. Aquaman could feel it in his
bones.
When he entered the Monitor Womb a few minutes later, he said.
“This isn’t anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard.”
Batman’s eyes narrowed as he regarded the Sea King.
“How can you tell?”
Aquaman tilted his head back and took a huge sniff. “The
air quality...the moisture content...I can’t sense the Potomac or
the Chesapeake Bay out beyond the walls. For that matter, I
can’t smell a surface city beyond the walls at all. ...or
an ocean.”
Batman waited a few beats before saying, “Welcome to the
Keep.” He hit a button and the viewscreens cycled open
showing Aquaman the kaleidoscopic multiverse beyond the Keep’s
walls.
#27