And here endeth the lesson. Read the final installment after the break.
Lemme know what y’all think in the comments. I slapped all these separate posts together at one time and scheduled them in advance… so for all I know I’ve been run over by a Mack truck and yer never gonna get to see anything else from the War With The Deep Ones. But assuming I’ve miraculously survived the last two weeks and retain enough cognitive function and physical capability to do anything about anything… does this seem like something you’d buy a paperback copy of? As a reminder, the first “War” story is Honolulu, the second is Champion of the Seas. Feel free to check them out.
Of course if I *am* dead, then I don’t care what people want. What with being dead and all.
Insight
By Scott Lowther
Copyright 2019
Two weeks before Invasion: Denver
The headquarters of the Office of Insight was busier than it had been since the early 90’s. No, the Director corrected himself. Not even then. Something was going on in the oceans, the whole world was talking, worrying and in some quarters panicking about it. The fish has disappeared, all over the world.
The Director was in his spacious and comfortably normal-looking office, a space befitting a modern CEO. One whole wall was a bank of flat panel monitors; at the moment, they were all showing silent news broadcasts from around the world. Most of the scenes were of the usual… disasters, wars, political contests, political scandals. The Director did not notice those. But the Office AI sifted through the thousands of feeds looking for certain anomalies, collating them, drawing tentative conclusions.
Six weeks before, the oceans had spoken. This was of course big news, but most media outlets treated it as a momentary minor mystery at best, or, more often, as something of a joke. A sizable fraction of the more excitable media outlets and talking heads were screaming about the voice in the ocean as having been the voice of God, or Satan, or space aliens. It saddened the Director that the people who were clearly crazy were the ones who were closest to being right.
The disappearance of the fish had been bigger news. Over the past six weeks, salt water fishermen around the world had reported a gradual decline in fish stocks; in the last two days reports were coming in of fisherman coming home utterly empty handed. At the same time, whales and dolphins had been beaching themselves in increasingly large numbers. Species that had once been hunted nearly to extinction, then protected by international law and finally were starting to recover, were now driving themselves to extinction on the beaches of the world. The world’s media was pulling its hair out over that. Many were putting the voice and the fish disappearance and the cetacean beachings together, but few could explain it.
Those few who could, worked for the Office of Insight.
Ever since the interviews had begun with the detainees from Innsmouth, more than a century before, those who had known the truth of the Deep Ones had been expecting an attack from the sea. Exactly how that attack would manifest had always been unclear. But it certainly seemed that it was at hand.
The Office of Insight was abuzz with activity. Plans laid down after the end of World War II were being put into effect. Facilities that had been packed full of supplies from the Korean War were being opened for the first time since the mid 1950s, their contents being checked. Agents were being put into position. The Department of Defense was filled with people who were associated with the office to one degree or another. It was about time to start alerting them.
The Brass Valley colony was being kept abreast of developments. The Brain Trust, six helpful thawed aliens and seven sullen ones, were informed of the latest and were providing what intelligence they could. The Deep Ones were more recent than they were, so the Brain Trust were in a way as in the dark as the humans. But their wisdom had proven useful in the past, and they’d helped the humans to get some of their old technologies up and running, a few of which were even comprehensible to the humans. Some were even being reproduced by the labs in the Brass Valley colony.
If the Deep Ones would only hold off for a few years, the Office of Insight would have some nasty surprises in store for them. But as it was, a little over a century of preparation should, the Director mused, prove to have been useful.
The Assistant Director had been pestering the Director about pulling up stakes and moving to Brass Valley. But the Director was not about to flee, not yet. There was too much to do. At the very least, there were some calls to make.
The Director reached for his phone.