It’s a gorgeous summer, even for the tropical paradise of Oceanis.  The temperatures have hovered at 95 degrees all season long with the calm azure waters of the Caribbean blending seamlessly into the cloudless sky. But the sprawling, luxurious resorts that normally serve as the playground for the world’s rich and famous are strangely vacant – only a scattering of vacationers are taking advantage of the breathtaking seascape, sizzling night spots, and the miles of immaculate boardwalk.  The series of recent earth tremors have sent the majority of the guests packing, and those that remain are finding it hard to shake the sense of foreboding that haunts the normally carefree tourist Mecca.  But even as business is cooling down on the beach, things are just heating up for Lieutenant Erin O’Neal, better known to the rest of the world as that amphibious daredevil Aquagirl.  For in an abandoned church near the industrial waterfront, Aquagirl has stumbled upon the very UNNATURAL instigator of the recent natural disasters.  Now she is the only one standing between Oceanis and the…

RED HOT SUMMER OF DOOM!

AN AQUAGIRL ADVENTURE

By

The Cliffhanger

WARNING: This story is copyright 2000 by the author.  Though based on familiar comic book themes, it is definitely NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN.  The following contains scenes of bondage, torture, and unsafe surfing practices that may disturb some readers.  And some of you are disturbed enough already.

“I should have known it was you all along, Halflife,” Aquagirl hissed between clenched teeth.  Deep in a subbasement of the abandoned Blood of the Martyr convent, the blonde bombshell found herself chained in a strict hog-tie, lying on her back in the center of a hydraulic press used to stamp steel components from sheet metal.   But her captor had not been content to merely tie her hands to her feet.  Instead, her ankles and wrists were manacled to steel cables running to pulleys mounted clear of the press, with Aquagirl’s legs pulled up behind her back and her arms bound together and pulled straight down to the level of her buttocks.  The relentless downward force on the wrist manacles was matched by the upward force on her ankles, forcing Aquagirl into a delightfully cruel position with her back bent into a high arch like a gymnast.  The young vigilante’s abdomen was thrust forward by the bondage until it almost touched the oily 3-ton plate hovering overhead.

“You knew nothing in life, Aquagirl, and you will know nothing in death.  Except pain.”

From the edge of press the unearthly figure of Halflife halted his adjustments to the pulley mechanisms and turned to regard his contorted captive.  The nuclear nightmare was a charred ghoul in an antique radiation suit, with only his skeletal face and glowing red eyes visible behind the yellowish face mask of his cylindrical helmet.  The suit wasn’t intended to keep radiation out, but rather to keep his own life-sustaining radioactivity contained within.

“Why go to all this trouble, Halflife?  Why didn’t you just crush my windpipe when you had the chance?”

Indeed, Halflife’s deathtrap was quite diabolical.  The steel cables securing her wrists and ankles ran from the heart of the steel press, through the lower set of pulleys, up through a similar set of pulleys on the ceiling, then down to the top of the hydraulically-controlled crusher plate.  Even as the plate descended from its idle position some 3 inches above her arched pelvis, her arms and legs would be drawn in opposite directions, forcing her into an ever-tighter pretzel.  She would be snapped in two even as she was slowly being crushed by the massive hydraulic press.  Sweat drenched her petite frame despite the oppressive cold of the basement and the light weight of her rubberized Lycra costume.

“Because my employer will be quite disappointed to learn that you are dead so soon.  It will be a small consolidation that you died in extreme pain.  It seems you have powerful enemies in Oceanis, my dear.”

“You think? Well you … should see me on the … volleyball court.”

“Still, your courage is admirable.  Not to mention your flexibility.” Halflife turned to a nearby control panel and flipped the switches to power up the press.  The vice-like plate over Aquagirl’s head raised slightly and, as predicted, the young heroine’s hog-tie eased somewhat as the chains slackened.  Certainly, the relief would only be temporary.

 “Normally I find no joy in the suffering of others, Aquagirl,” Halflife continued in his haunting monotone, clearly the product of an outdated speech generation system in the suit.  “I was cut off from all physical pleasure long ago.  But somehow you still … move me.”

“I hope you’re not asking me out …,” Aquagirl said weakly, straining against the heavy manacles bolted around her slim wrists. “I make it a general rule … not to date … UHHH … the undead.”

Indeed, the sight of Aquagirl was enough to make even the most hardened villain rethink his commitment to evil.  At 5’5” and 110 pounds she was hardly an imposing vigilante, but her body was cut with the rippling muscles of a world-class gymnast and her seductive costume served to accentuate every inch of her hourglass form.  She wore a sleek black and yellow long-sleeved turtleneck body suit made of rubberized Lycra, high-cut at the thighs with a narrow crotch.  Sheer glossy hose covered her lean, tanned legs down to her low neoprene boots, and her close fitting high-tech utility belt highlighted the gentle flair of her hips.  Her pouting blue eyes were framed by a yellow-tinted visor integrated into her cowl.  The cowl left the lower portion of her face exposed and terminated at her hairline, allowing her silky blonde hair to frame her face and flow freely down her back.  In short, she looked more like a professional cheerleader than a superheroine, and this had worked to her advantage in countless scrapes against her opponents.

But Halflife seemed impervious to her obvious charms.  A high-pitched grating sound emanated from the speaker and it took Aquagirl several long moments to recognize it as laughter.   Halflife drew closer, his charred cancerous face drawn tight into a permanent skeletal grin behind the yellow visor.  “I fear your parents would not approve of our courtship.  Shall I demonstrate?”

Halflife disappeared for a moment and returned holding a flower, a long-stemmed orchid.  Aquagirl could smell the soft scent of the fresh flower even through the overpowering smells of machine oil, ground metal, and her own sweat.   “Flowers are one of my few remaining passions,” Halflife explained, “So beautiful, yet so delicate.”

The trapped Aquagirl watched in amazement, her peril momentarily forgotten, as Halflife slowly removed one of this stained gloves to reveal a steamy, skeletal hand, with the flesh blackened and crispy and bones exposed in many places.  He grasped the flower with his exposed hand and the bloom immediately wilted and began to smolder.  In less than 30 seconds the once-vibrant orchid was a blackened and mummified husk.

“You wouldn’t live long in my embrace I can assure you,” Halflife mused as he laid the flower on the iron plate of the press and replaced his glove.  “However, all suffering is relative.  Perhaps I could grant you a quick death, if you are willing to tell me how you found this place.”

For a moment heroine and supervillain locked gazes, Aquagirl’s baby blues against Halflife’s gleaming red coals.  What could she tell him that would spare her life, or even delay the inevitable?  She had stumbled onto his subterranean workshop quite accidentally, while investigating a rash of missing young people who had disappeared since the onset of the earthquakes.  She had reasoned that the disappearances were probably linked to the rash of doomsday cults that have recently sprung up in the poorest parts of the city, and Erin had assumed the role of Aquagirl to investigate.  She had stumbled upon the lab deep beneath an abandoned church, a lab that incredibly seemed equipped for the fabrication of nuclear weapons.  This was Halflife’s specialty, but before she could escape to alert the authorities, she had found herself locked in the grasp of the atomic atrocity with no way to escape.  She would have told him all this if it would have done any good, but bargaining with a monster Halflife was hopeless.  Aquagirl’s heart raced as she looked into his inhuman eyes, cursing her own horrible luck for falling such easy prey to the undead juggernaut.  If she had had any idea that such an infamous fiend had come to Oceanis she would have been much more careful.

“You’re all heart, Halflife, but you might as well get on with your fun.”

“On that you are mistaken,” Halflife depressed a large red button on a nearby control panel, activating the press with a loud blaring of claxons and the activation of a dozen rotating red warning lights.  “I have no heart, nor stomach, nor appendages that function without mechanical assistance.  Even my eyes are but devices of my own invention. “

The shapely daredevil gasped and renewed her desperate struggles as the deathtrap was set into slow, inexorable motion.  Halflife had modified the press to operate at a fraction of its usual speed.  The motion was almost imperceptible from Aquagirl’s vantage directly beneath the plate, but the slow retraction of her wrists and ankles gave irrefutable proof of the plate’s descent.  The manacles she wore were, like everything about Halflife, of antique design bolted painfully tight, and the cables were thick enough to tow a river barge.  The plate overhead seemed to swallow up any light in the room and was made of solid carbon steel, as was the surface beneath her arched back.  The only flexible element of the entire trap was the 21-year-old vigilante at its heart.  And flex she would, to her limits and far beyond.

“Farewell Aquagirl,” Halflife said to the sexy sleuth as she moaned softly from the effort of her struggles. “Consider yourself fortunate that you are perishing so early in this unholy affair.  My employer had quite  … deviant plans for you in his floating temple.”

“Floating temple?”

But Aquagirl had no opportunity to question Halflife further about his odd statement, for the madman had moved out of her limited range of vision as he made his exit.  She carefully scanned the draft workshop as best she could and finally convinced herself that Halflife had indeed departed.  At least he would not be on hand to actively prevent her from escaping.  Assuming, of course, she could find some way to escape to begin with.  At the moment the trap seemed lethal and foolproof.

Aquagirl’s hips and shoulders ached with a deep maddening pain that gave her a hint of things to come.  Her wrists and ankles burned as they bore the brunt of the force threatening to pull her apart.  As she looked up between the twin mounds of her breasts she could now note the slow progress of the upper plate as it descended toward her, first just to kiss her abdomen then to slowly crush her into bloody ruin.  The gleam of the red warning lights danced on the glossy surface of her skin-tight uniform as she struggled and the muscles of her silky legs quivered as they rebelled against the cruel restraints.  Several red and green LEDs blinked tranquilly on the caplox devices that she wore at either hip on her black brushed-steel utility belt, but even these amazing devices were of little use at the moment.  Aquagirl’s pussy tingled madly beneath the thin rubberized fabric of her body suit as a feeling of complete helplessness washed over her.  Halflife had devised his deathtrap with fiendish detail  -- the amphibious avenger would find no easy way out of this one.

It was then she noticed the sign posted on the wall near the control station, previously obscured by Halflife’s immense bulk.  It read, “WARNING!  EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS! KEEP HANDS AND FEET AWAY FROM PRESS!”

Aquagirl burst out into laughter -- the shrill, strained laughter of one on the edge of hysteria.  Once the press started doing its work, the safety of her arms and legs would be the least of her worries.

* * *

Meanwhile, even as Aquagirl contemplated her grisly fate, Halflife was making his second villainous visit of the evening.  He stood impassively on the aft deck of a rusting trawler, lurching with the ship as it powered through the ocean swells.  His beady red eyes were the only lights that burned on the entire vessel, and the unearthly glow illuminated the large crate beside him that represented the final delivery to his current employer.  Further forward, in a partially covered wheelhouse, stood the rusty boat’s lone crewman, a wiry old black man with a prominent gold tooth who guided the craft with the precision of a veteran smuggler.  If the man was concerned about his cargo or the nature of his inhuman passenger he gave no indication.  He only stared straight ahead at the inky water beyond the bow of the ship, as if some unseen markers in the depths were guiding him to his invisible destination.

They were still surrounded by water as far as the eye could see when the drone of the ancient diesel engine finally wavered and then went silent.  Halflife turned to the regard the old man.

“Why are we stopping?”

“We there,” the leathery Negro put a cigar-sized joint in his mouth and fished in his pockets for a lighter. “Dis be di drop site.”

“But there’s nothing here. What do we do now?”

“Res’ easy, Devil mon. They be comin’.”

And they didn’t have to wait long.  The boat had been adrift for less than 10 minutes before they came, emerging like ghosts from the waves and swarming aboard from all sides.  There were nine all told, eight men and one woman all dressed in gleaming black rubber belted at the waist with bare feet and hands.  Even in the dim starlight it was easy to distinguish their pale green complexions, their catlike pupils, and the webbing between their elongated fingers and toes.  The men carried long black weapons that appeared to be high-powered harpoon guns.

“Good evening, Halflife,” The woman said.  She was sleek and sexy, with a waspishly thin waist and white, almost translucent hair that flowed down to her waist. “What brings you to the Temple of Lord Triton on such a dark, trackless night.”

“Early delivery of my final device, Lady Amphitrite.  I was visited by a friend of yours this evening.”

“Aquagirl?” the women brought her hands together with delight. “You brought her here?”

“No,” Halflife’s response was flat, and Amphitrite’s face immediately registered her disappointment. “I judged her too … resourceful to trifle with.  She very nearly shattered my visor with a length of pipe.”

“So you killed her.” Amphitrite’s tone was as cold and the ocean depths.

“I had no choice.  Surely someone can take her place in the …”

“Take her place?!” Amphitrite spat. “She alone pretends to protect the sea while whoring with the landsmen.  Lord Triton will be most disappointed – he had a most splendid demise arranged for Aquagirl.”

“Then is seems your chamber of horrors will go unused, sea witch” Halflife cackled. “But here, I have something that might take your mind off your loss.”

Halflife sank his mechanically actuated fingers into the wood of the crate beside him and pulled away the lid.  Within was a bizarre device that resembled a huge box kite made entirely of heavy black piping.  The base consisted of a smooth aluminum sphere half a meter in diameter secured within a cube of steel pipes.  Six feet above the base was a second smaller pipe cube, hollow but with an aluminum skin covering its vertical walls.  Mounted on each wall was a squat cylindrical turbo fan with an electrical servo mounted on the inside of the protective enclosure to control the orientation of the thrust.  The upper and lower elements of the sinister device were connected by means of heavy black pipes that tapered from the upper corners of the large base cube to the lower corners of the smaller overhead guidance cube. The array of floodlights mounted on the frame, the high-tech maneuvering jets, and the foam rubber protecting much of the piping gave the impression that the device was some sort of experimental submarine.  But the large radiation warning symbols on the aluminum sphere, betrayed its true purpose: it was a powerful deep-water bomb.

“Impressive,” Amphitrite stared, forgetting for a moment the untimely demise of her master’s prize.  “But what is the purpose of the fans?”

“Guidance system,” Halflife pointed to a heavy aluminum enclosure mounted to the frame just above the spherical bomb. “This control computer uses the jets to regulate the rate of descent and to steer clear of underwater obstacles.  The guidance system will steer this final device deep into the heart of Lucifer’s Rift before it finally detonates.”

“A rift already greatly weakened by your previous devices.”

“Yes,” Halflife was devoid of emotion. “If detonated at a depth of greater than 4,000 meters, the resulting shockwave should shatter the weakened tectonic fault lines for a thousand miles.”

“Excellent,” the slithery woman hissed at the thought of the effect such a massive fissure would have on the local geography. “And this achieve our aims?”

“Most certainly, as long as the guidance system functions properly.“

“Very good.” Amphitrite turned to the old smuggler. “Antoine, set a course for the TRITON immediately, compass heading 92 degrees.  The master will be eager to feast his eyes on the bane of the surface dwellers.”

“Yea mon.”  The diesel engine coughed wearily to life and the old boat again began making way.

“And you,” Amphitrite turned to her nuclear henchman. “Will you be staying to witness the fruits of your handiwork?”

“Of course,” Halflife let out a screeched of laughter that startled everyone on board. “It is not every day that I get to witness an entire city plunged into the sea.”

* *  *

“UGGH!”

“UGGH!”

Back in Halflife’s abandoned laboratory, time was quickly running out for Aquagirl.  For over 20 minutes the press had slowly descended on the doomed young woman, drawing her legs upward and out to the side in a painfully unnatural version of the splits and her arms down until they were a full foot below her crotch.  Her shoulders were driven fast against the lower plate of the press and the upper plate was pressing hard against her breasts and abdomen, forcing her head permanently to one side.  Only the slow action of the chains had allowed her to assume such a contorted position, but with barely a foot of room left between the two plates, she was rapidly running out of time.

Unfortunately, the claustrophobic horror of the trap made it almost impossible to think rationally.  Aquagirl’s arms and legs screamed with pain and spasmed constantly from the cramps that would not relent.  The blonde bombshell was no stranger to strict bondage, and she even practiced on occasion with her occasional partner Nightcat.  But even the most stringent bondage games could never prepare her for the real thing.  In less than two minutes, Erin O’Neal’s bones would begin snapping under the force of the press.  In four she would be dead … at least if she were lucky.

“God No!” She moaned as she opened her eyes once more to desperately survey her surroundings. Just before her, not 6 feet away, was the control panel that could save her from her horrible fate.  At her waist in her utility belt was a concussive drag line that she could fire at the panel if she could only she could get a hand free.  He wrist console had an emergency signaling device so she could signal Nightcat for help, but Halflife had removed it prior to bolting down her wrist manacles and securing his groggy victim into position.  Pain and fear and the overwhelming sense of complete helplessness washed over the young dynamo, as she pressed up against the descending plate with her rubber-clad pelvis in a futile attempt to hold off the crushing plate.

KEEP YOUR HANDS AND FEET AWAY FROM THE PRESS.

Hands and feet.  What would you do if you put your hands and feet into the press?  She had assumed that it was just a basic warning, but what if the press actually had a safety device to prevent the operator’s limbs from being inadvertently crushed? Urgently she scanned the perimeter of the press, with intensity born of desperation…

There!  She could see them with the aid of her tinted visor, a line of seeing-eye beams running from the upper plate to the lower plate.  If she could just break the beams, it would trigger the security override.  And Halflife had given her just the mechanism to do it: the charred flower!  But time was running out.  The upper plate was pressing hard against her cheek and the pressure on her muscular body was nothing short of torture.  She had to act fast.

Aquagirl stilled her mind, focusing her thoughts to trigger the biofeedback loop that controlled the caplox devices on her belt.  The primary purpose of the ingenious devices was to allow her to breathe underwater by extracting oxygen from the water and introducing it into her blood stream through a network of artificial capillaries that ran through the major arteries of her body.  The system, however, required a great deal of water to extract enough oxygen to sustain a human being and this contributed to its dual purpose.  By vectoring the jets of high-speed water emitted by the caplox units, they could also be used as a personal propulsion system.  Aquagirl could precisely control the system using the biofeedback sensors that were integrated with the capillaries, and after extensive training she was capable of amazing feats of underwater gymnastics. Of course, out of the water the caplox devices could produce little more than a stiff breeze.  But that was exactly what the blue-eyed dynamo needed at the moment.

“UHHHH!” Aquagirl cried out in desperate pain as the chains continued to tighten.  But even through her pain she was gratified to feel the hockey puck-sized devices at her belt hum powerfully to life.  She wanted to move the flower slowly and deliberately, hoping to maximize the chance that it would interrupt the security beams before falling to the floor.  But the pain was simply too intense—her arms and legs would be pulled out of their joints at any moment and her head was all but clamped fast between the plates.  The biofeedback circuit responded to her surge of panic by generating a powerful jet of air that sent the crispy flower skittering across the lower surface of the plate and out into the room.  And as soon as the flower broke the safety beams, the klaxons immediately sounded again and the upper plate raised to full open position.  Aquagirl was saved!

The transition from extreme contortion to normal posture was almost as painful as the initial process had been.  Aquagirl could feel her joints settling back into their sockets and for the first time in 20 minutes could take a full breath of air.

“Damn, but that was close!” The blue-eyed beauty sighed as soon as she had caught her breath.

Most people would be horrified after such an ordeal, but Aquagirl’s mind was flushed with the sense of victory at having defeated yet another attempt on her life.  As a female superheroine she had already faced dozens of perils at the hands of the world’s most diabolical criminals and she had always eventually found some means of escape.  She had even come to look on her opponent’s ploys with a sense of dark fascination.  She never felt more vibrant, uninhibited, and alive than when she was helpless in the hands of her enemies, with only her wits, strength and courage standing between her and death.  And there was no greater triumph than the adrenaline rush that inevitably accompanied an escape from a particularly fiendish trap.

After savoring the moment, Aquagirl finally reached for the spring wrench in her utility belt to release the heavy manacles.  But even as she undid the bolts, her mind was already racing with the implications of her unexpected discovery.  If Halflife was indeed at large, than the city was in dire peril.

And it was up to Aquagirl to stop it.

* * *

“Up Drako, UP!”

Another training session was winding down at the Oceanis Aquatic Institute, but Dr Peggy Lane was trying to prod a few more stunts out of her weary charges, the Institute’s two killer whales Niko and Drako.  She was standing on a platform perched some 25 feet above the huge whale pool, dangling a fresh fish over the railing.  But Drako, a huge male and one of largest killer whales in captivity, seemed little interested in the treat as he circled near the bottom of the 30 foot pool.

“DRAKO! UP!” Dr Lane commanded again, tapping her foot with impatience. “Typical pigheaded conceited male.”  It was unthinkable that Drako wasn’t hungry – killer whales were always hungry.  He was just making statement about who was the REAL star of the show.

“Fine, be that way.  Niko! Up!” Niko, a young female and hopefully a future mate for Drako, broke quickly from her route at the bottom of the tank and shot for the surface.  The 2-ton whale sprang from the water effortlessly, rising to the level of the Dr Lane’s hand and snatching the fish before falling earthward with a tremendous splash that was sure to drench everyone in the first 3 rows of the high-tech open-air amphitheater.

“Bravo! Bravo!” Came cheers from a crowd of one, accompanied by a single pair of clapping hands.  It wasn’t hard for Dr Lane to spy Erin O’Neal standing near the top row of bleachers.  Erin was dressed in the red tank swimsuit, nylon shorts, and red wind jacket that identified her as an officer of the Oceanis Water Patrol.  The patch on her shoulder as well as the gun belt around her waist distinguished her as a member of the Special Crimes Unit, an elite team that worked within the larger body of professional lifeguards to keep the pristine beaches of Oceanis safe from more serious criminal activities.  Erin’s eyes were concealed behind Ray-ban Wayfarers and she carried her street clothes in a gym bag slung over her shoulder.

“Thanks Erin!” Dr Lane smiled as she wiped her hands off with a towel.  “I wish you could have caught us at a better time.”

“A better time?!” Erin walked down the isle toward the Lucite wall of the huge 30-foot deep aquarium. “Niko might be the youngest high jumper in the world!  You should publish a paper on your new training regimen.”

“I could, but then I’d have to explain why Drako, the largest high jumper in the world, is still in love with one of our grad students. I think I’d be drummed out of the Federation of Veterinary Medicine.“

“Drako and I just have an understanding,” Erin shrugged, ”Too many jumps, flips, and ball tricks makes him feel like a trained monkey. If you want him to perform YOU need to perform with him!”

Dr Lane looked down at Erin with a smile one might give her small child just before telling them that there was no Santa Clause. “Really, Erin, have you already forgotten all your marine mammal psychology?  Drako is an eating machine that responds to patterns of positive and negative reinforcement.  He’s just in a state of over reinforcement, and feels no need to perform in order to win his food.  In short he’s just gone lazy and I’ve developed a new regimen to snap him out of it … and what ARE you doing.”

While Dr Lane was talking Erin had quickly stripped down to her bathing suit, leaving her jacket, gun belt and shorts on a first-row seat.  After shedding her sandals and Ray-Bans she sprang up onto the wall of the pool, then clapped her hands over her head three times.

“DRAKO TO ME!”

“Erin?! You’re interrupting my training!  Surely you can’t expect Drako to …”

But even while Dr Lane chattered angrily, Drako himself had surfaced to take a better look at the newcomer.  Erin remained on the wall of the pool with her hands over her head.

“DRAKO! DIVE!”

There was a moment of hesitation, but then the huge leviathan responded to the oddly familiar command and disappeared in the depths of the pool.  Erin O’Neal followed him in a moment later, diving into the chilly water and kicking gracefully toward the bottom of the pool.  Once her feet struck concrete she kicked up a short distance and “assumed the position,” arms at her sides with her back slightly arched and legs locked in preparation for the sudden shock.  For a moment she simply hung suspended in the tank, an exquisite statue holding a graceful pose with golden hair waving lazily around her head.  But then she felt the light impact of a huge nose against her bare feet.  Drako gave his long-lost trainer a moment to establish her balanced in the whale induced gravity, then he accelerated upward with explosive force.  Erin’s recently hyperextended joints screamed from the effort of maintaining the strict pose even as the force of the water pushed down on her like a sledgehammer.  And just when it seemed she would be forced from her precarious perch by the unyielding force she was suddenly airborne -- both whale and trainer shot skyward at nearly 40 miles her hour.  Gravity quickly pulled Drako’s 8-ton body back into the pool, but Erin took a final spring off his snout and arched gracefully skyward with her arms straight out from her sides.  Gravity finally claimed her as well some 35 feet above the pool, so the blonde daredevil piked and allowed herself to rotate backwards into a vertical swan dive.  The force of the impact was again tremendous, but Erin rounded out the dive quickly and kicked contentedly to the surface.

Even as Erin squeezed her hair out behind her head, Drako rose to the surface nearby, chortling.

“Drako! You big stud! Lets tan!”

Drako immediately responded to the commands from their old routine and slipped quietly by Erin, giving her the opportunity to grab his upper dorsal fin for a short ride.  Drako built up some speed as he made for the sloping skidway, and his momentum carried him up the slippery ramp and completely out of the water.  His trainer dropped down beside him on her stomach as if they were laying out on the beach.

“Over!”

As one, the two rolled over on their backs, Erin rolling one way and Drako rolling the other to expose his milky white belly.

“I … I don’t believe it,” Dr Long had come down from the platform and was now standing over the reclining Erin O’Neal and rubbing Drako’s snout.  “No trainer has been able to perform a nose dive off Drako in nearly two years.! Since your last summer as an intern.”

“And you still miss me, don’t you big fella?”  Erin got her feet, reached into the trainers bucket, and threw a handful of sardines into the killer whales open mouth.  She then pretended to push him back into the pool and the 8-ton monster responding by wriggling himself back into the water.

Erin had worked at the Aquatics institute for nearly 8 years, starting in high school and continuing through college and her master degree.  She had moved up from cleaning cages, to leading tours, to handling animals, and had finally become one of the Institute’s premier performing trainers.  In the process, she had completed her masters degree in marine veterinary science and would have continued on to get her PhD had Oceanis not fallen prey to certain very powerful criminal elements.  Events led her to turn away from the study of the aquatic world and instead become its masked protector.  But there was one person at the Aquatics Institute that she still dealt with on a regular basis.  The man perhaps more responsible than Erin herself for the creation of the Aquagirl legend.

“So where’s Dr Vargas?”

“He’s in his private lab, as usual.  He’s hardly left for days.”

No doubt he was trying to sort out the scientific implications of Aquagirl’s recent encounter with Chronus and his experimental temporal disruption machine.  Erin had very nearly found herself the first test subject for the vast device which would either have transported her into another dimension or scattered every atom in her body uniformly across the known universe.  Either alternative would have been grim.  Hopefully, Vargas had at least found time to repair her Aquabike.

“DRAKO! FLY!”

With a chuckle Drako bid farewell and disappeared back into the water. Erin picked up a towel and quickly patted herself dry.

“Of course, your theatrics prove nothing, you know.” Dr Lane had already regained her composure. “Your antics merely demonstrate that Drako has retained a memory of his past performance routines.  When prompted unexpectedly with your voice he simply reverted to prior conditioning. Typical Pavlovian response.”

“Peggy, all I’m saying is suit up and swim with him.  You don’t have to pull 5 Gs off Drako’s nose, just let him pull you around the tank.  Maybe even a bareback water ski trick. “

The tall, gaunt professor looked shocked. “That kind of behavior might be acceptable for an 18-year-old intern, my dear, but not for a respected professional.  The whales perform for us, not us for them.”

“Suit yourself.” Erin returned to her small pile of clothing and stepping back into her shorts. “  The swim had actually felt wonderful after a long day in the towers looking for a drug dealer that was posing as an Oceanis lifeguard. “But if you want me to work up some water bits with you, you know where to find me.”

“I hardly think that will be necessary.”

Erin slipped her bag back over her shoulder and walked back through the maze of smaller holding tanks toward Dr Vargas’ personal labs.   It had been Dr Vargas that had invented the caplox breathing devices and oxygenating artificial capillaries that allowed Aquagirl to remain underwater indefinitely.  He also created her liquid filled “deep suit” that allowed her to work at great depths without extensive decompression.  He created her custom Aquabike that was equally versatile under water or on the street.  In fact, he had created most of the high-tech devices Aquagirl used to carry out her lone battle against the most sinister criminal elements in Oceanis.  At times, Erin felt that Vargas was closer to her than a father.  But in reality Erin knew that Vargas looked on her not as a daughter but as a soldier, a valuable but ultimately expendable weapon in his high-stakes war on crime.  On a number of occasions her “father” had dispatched Aquagirl on missions from which they both knew she would not likely return.

Erin traveled down two flight of concrete stairs to the subbasements of the research facility and through a heavy blast door controlled by a retinal scanner before entering into the small complex that served both as Dr Vargas’ private lab as well as the base of operations for Aquagirl.  Just inside the door was a small landing overlooking a large pool that served as a testing ground for new equipment as well as a  subterranean dock for her Aquabike.  A doorway on one wall led to the locker room where her costumes and equipment were stored, and another wall opened on a hallway that led to a maze of labs, storage rooms, and vaults.  To her right and 10 feet above the concrete floor were series of Plexiglas windows overlooking the pool.  Behind the windows was a high-tech control room, unlit but for the comfortable glow of numerous computer monitors and the blinking lights on the bays of electrical equipment lining the walls. A spiral staircase in the corner served as the entrance to the control room, literally the nerve center of Vargas’ operation.  The old professor would certainly be up there.

As Erin made for the spiral staircase, she noted with satisfaction that her Aquabike was once again parked in its cradle, ready for action.  It was basically a jet turbine engine wrapped in black fiberglass with tinted glass.  The wheels were retractable and at the moment were pulled up inside the hull of the bike not unlike landing gear on an aircraft.  The windshield was also a bit like the canopy of a jet fighter, extending completely up and over the riders seat.  This cover served little purpose on land, but submerged prevented her from being ripped off the bike by the sheer force of the water resistance when moving at high speeds.   Aquagirl’s emblem, the stylized head of a rearing seahorse, blazed in metallic yellow on either side of the menacing black machine.

Erin sprang up the spiral staircase and entered the control room.  As she had expected, Vargas was there bathed in the light of a half dozen cathode ray tubes.  The screens were filled with various maps showing the land and sea floor features surrounding Oceanis.  The epicenters of the recent rash of earth tremors were marked on the various maps.  Clearly, the recent string of ominous quakes were as much on the mind of the great Dr Constantine Vargas as anyone.  So great was his concentration that he didn’t even realize Erin had arrived.

“Making any progress?”

“Ehhh? Oh, hello, Little Pichayana.”  He finally greeted her, with a heavy Slovak accent. ”Is always progress. Mostly in wrong direction.”

“That looks promising.” Erin knelt down behind him and wrapped her arms around his meaty neck, staring at the array of screens. “All of the quakes originated from the same place.”  According to Vargas’ charts all of the quakes had originated at various points along a deep gorge on the ocean floor – Lucifer’s Rift.

“Would not be my choice of words – promising.  Lucifer’s Rift is 10,000 meters deep at places, maybe more.  It is what you say a …. “

“A fault line.”

“Yes.  Fault line.  Deepest in a web of faults that form coastline.  The tremors, they signal a gradual weakening of the fault due to tremendous subterranean forces.”

“Do you think these tremors could be man made?”

Vargas stared at the screen for along time before giving his head a single vigorous shake. “No.  Tremors are beginning at shallowest points of rift and proceeding to the deepest, just as expected.  Man would require intimate knowledge of the sea floor to replicate such a thing.  Then to cause the tremors, would take tremendous power.  Something like a … “

“A nuclear bomb?”

“Yes. Very powerful.”

Erin stood up and leaned against the control console so as to better confront her mentor.

“I ran across an old friend of your last night: Halflife.  He had a workshop set up in the basement of one of the new doomsday cults.”

“Halflife? Here?!” Erin suddenly had Vargas’ full attention. “And you still alive?”

“Lucky for me he had some important business to attend to.   He implied that his employers are headquartered on a ship somewhere off shore.”

Vargas leaned back and stroked his beard thoughtfully. “Atomic bomb Halflife’s specialty.  Fault is greatly weakened.  Next deep blast could be big trouble.”

“I agree.  It seems the Cult of Lord Triton has gotten a little tired of waiting for the end to come and is plotting to bring it about themselves. “

“Floating temple useful for delivering bombs. But where to look? Is big ocean.”

“I don’t think I’ll need to look anywhere,” Erin smiled, “I’m sure that the Triton cult is also behind the recent rash of disappearances.  I spent the morning at central records and I confirmed that all the missing persons were alone and were on the water when they were abducted.  The police are keeping this information quite lest we drive off the few remaining guests.”

“So how you make yourself next target?”

“Easy.  I’m going surfing.”

* * *

With the 30-foot breakers off Widows’ Point all to herself, Erin could almost completely overlook the fact that she was serving as human bait to attract a deadly doomsday cult.  The monstrous walls of blue-green water presented quite enough danger and excitement in their own right.  A nasty wipeout could easily break bones or knock an unwary surfer unconscious and the rip tide that formed near the rocky shoreline could draw an unfortunate victim 50 feet under water in a matter of seconds.  But these were the hazards that all surfers had to confront in order to ride the really big waves and Erin had already shot a half dozen tubes so huge that she could stand completely upright within the living cascades of crystalline seawater.

But if her abductors were going to take the bait they were running out of time.  She had been out in the surf for over four hours playing the role of helpless damsel wearing a bright yellow wetsuit that made her hard to miss amidst the backdrop of endless blue.  In all that time she had seen no signs of suspicious activity beyond the legions of seagulls squabbling over stolen shellfish and a gang of young teenagers drinking beer on the distant beach.  There were no signs of suspicious watercraft, lookouts, or other vehicles that could be used to carry out a kidnapping.   As the sun disappeared beneath the western mountains Erin ended another run and dropped onto her surfboard to rest.   With the dusk steadily deepening and the wind dying down, she had all but given up on picking up Halflife’s trail for the time being.  Still, it had been a hell of a day for surfing and there was time for one last ride.

WHRRRRRRR

The hot yellow of her wetsuit made it easy to conceal the belt at her waist that held sleek, stripped-down versions of her Aquagirl caplox devices.  The jets of water firing from the compact units drove her quickly and efficiently out to sea as she rested her upper body on the surfboard and kicked along lazily.  The devices also flooded Erin’s bloodstream with oxygen extracted from the water, infusing it into her bloodstream through the network of artificial oxygenating capillaries that Dr Vargas and implanted.  As long as the caplox devices were functioning properly, conventional breathing became a fully optional exercise.   In the airless underwater world where most people struggled with oxygen deprivation even with clunky SCUBA gear, she was perfectly at home.  If anyone dared to confront Erin O’Neal in an open ocean abduction attempt, they would be in for one hell of a surprise.

After powering approximately 1500 meters through the surf, the blonde bombshell finally turned back toward land and slipped up on her board to await the last wave of the day.  Unfortunately, all around her the swells seemed to be rapidly losing intensity and it seemed likely that she would eventually have to jet back to shore the same way she had come: on her belly.  Regardless, the weather was still spectacular and the surf was as warm as bath water, so Erin was in no hurry to head for home.  Given all the day’s exertions it felt wonderful to just drift on her board and allow the sea to rock her gently into a light snooze.  Choosing to serve as a masked defender of a tropical resort city instead of a distant snowy metropolis did have its fringe benefits.

WHOOSH!

Erin’s peaceful catnap was suddenly interrupted by a powerful jolt from beneath her board that sent her tumbling into the water.  She had been caught completely by surprise, but Erin’s combat instincts took over and by the time she checked her downward momentum her caplox jets were charged and ready for action.  The fight against a pack of SCUBA punks would inevitably be brief and one-sided so her mind was already reviewing her next steps.  She would take her assailant’s prisoner and with the aid of some of Dr Vargas’s “don’t care” juice she would soon have the location of Lord Triton’s floating temple.  Locating the nuclear bombs would be easy once she was on board the ship and she would disarm them while the Coast Guard closed in for the kill.  The only potential snag could be determining the fate of the abducted women before …

Erin’s rapid-fire thoughts came to a screaming halt.  Despite all of her desire for action, now that the moment had finally come all she could do was hang weightlessly above the white sand dessert that was the sea floor and stare in stunned amazement at the sight that greeted her.  Her attackers weren’t human.

At least they weren’t entirely human.  Hovering immediately before and behind Erin were two slim, extremely tall men wearing black wetsuits with exposed hands and feet.  At first glance they appeared normal, but their skin was pasty with a greenish tinge and their hair was milky white pulled back in ponytails behind their heads.  They didn’t seem to be wearing any breathing apparatus whatsoever, nor were they wearing any sort of mask over their eyes.  Erin’s vision was somewhat blurry due to the fact that she had no mask herself, but she could almost swear that their hands and feet were WEBBED.

The young vigilante’s moment of hesitation was all that the two men required to effect her capture.  Smiling wickedly, one of the men raised what looked like a small compressed-air dart gun and fired.  The slim but heavy projectile struck her in the center of the abdomen and she felt a sharp prick as a hypodermic needle penetrated her wet suit and buried itself deeply into her body.  She managed to remove the dart, but the flesh around the impact wound already felt numb with tingling fingers reaching out in all directions.  The fingers rapidly became a hand and then a clutching fist closing in on her with tremendous pressure.

Erin attempted to take the offensive before the drug could completely sap her strength, but inwardly she knew it was already too late.  Her fingers responded only grudgingly to her attempts to manipulate the caplox controls secreted in her gloves and her vision rapidly narrowed down to a long, narrow tunnel.  In the end she failed to activate the controls at all and instead found herself in the powerful but oddly chilling embrace of one of the mermen.  He flashed her a dangerous grin, but he seemed so far away at the moment that it was impossible to feel threatened.  Then her gums began to tingle and the tunnel finally closed in around her, hurling Aquagirl into a dreamworld as dark as the deepest sea.

* * *

“Mmmmh,” Erin moaned weakly as consciousness slowly returned.  Her mind was still heavily clouded by the drug, but a deep ache in her shoulders and hips had drawn her back to reality with a mounting sense of urgency.  Even half-drugged with her eyes closed she knew she was bound to some sort of lab table tilted just short of vertical.  Based on the swirling of air currents she knew that she had been stripped naked and the hands that occasionally touched body told her that she wasn’t alone.  As her senses slowly coalesced she realized that her visitor was a man and he was humming a haunting tune as he carefully took her various measurements with a tape measure and calipers.

“Coming around already?” the workman said with a soft, nasal voice. “Amazing constitution, for a land slut.”

Still feigning unconsciousness, Erin heard the opening of a heavy door nearby.  A male newcomer let out a long low whistle of appreciation.

“I see you are preparing the new initiate for her passage.”

“Indeed, she will make a most comely mate.  Provided, of course, she survives the transmutation process.”

“Yes, I have some to tell you to proceed with your preparations,” the newcomer continued, “Her physiology is compatible with the process.  Though somewhat odd.”

“How so?” Erin could feel the workman pressing warm rubbery sheet over her breasts.  After a few moments he pulled it away apparently making some type of mold of her figure.

“The test was inconclusive – extremely high red cell count in her bloodstream.   I took the matter to Lord Triton and he indicated that she was apparently an athlete using some sort of blood doping.  What is this?”  The man pointed to a spot high on Erin’s naked hip.

“Some sort of mole or wart.  Common on these land animals.”

Erin felt a finger playing across her hip.  This was the point where the artificial capillaries in her arteries interconnected with the caplox devices to provide her oxygen.  Dr Vargas had tried to make them look like a mole or a birthmark, but the stringy consistency made them better resemble large discolored planters warts.  Erin had insisted that they be placed high enough that they wouldn’t be visible in French cut swimwear, but they were hard to miss when she was buck-naked.

“Strange,” the visitor thankfully lost interest in the matter and changed the subject. “On another matter. Amphitrite wishes to speak with you immediately, about Aquagirl.”

“I heard she was dead, killed by Halflife.”

“Yes, and with Aquagirl dead Amphitrite wishes to discuss a suitable subject to receive the Encephaline Symbiot.”

“Very well, though it seems to me to be a cruel waste of perfectly good initiate.  I will report to our mistress immediately.”

Erin continued to hang limply in her bonds as she heard the newcomer leave, followed closely by the man who had been taking her measurements.  For nearly a minute she waited in complete silence until she was sure she was alone at last.  Only then did the blonde daredevil risk a look around.

She found herself in a cramped but brightly lit ship’s workshop, secured spread eagle on an articulated table made of stainless steel raised to just short of  vertical.  She had been stripped naked, cuffed, and secured to the table at the wrists, ankles, waist, and throat.  The remains of her yellow wetsuit and the yellow bikini she had worn underneath were piled on the floor at her feet and her surfboard was propped up in one corner.  Erin’s wrists and ankles were enclosed in thick leather bondage cuffs that were double-secured by buckles and steel padlocks.  Small wonder that her captor was  little concerned about leaving her unguarded in the workshop.  Indeed, based on what Erin saw around her, it was she that had more cause to be concerned.

The entire compartment seemed to be some sort of bizarre tailor shop dedicated to rubber bondage.  A row of black rubber catsuits, not unlike the suits that her captors had worn, hung on one wall, and the nearby shelves were devoted to rubberized booties, gloves, and bondage helmets.  One catsuit had already been selected from the rack and hung near the workbench directly across from the table where Erin was secured.   Commanding the workbench itself was a long flat device that resembled a waffle iron: a hot press that could be used to form the glossy rubber of the basic catsuits to fit the precise dimensions of the intended wearer.  A number of spools of material hung on one wall for easy dispensing, including rubber fabric, heavy leather strapping, and steel chain.  A pegboard above the spools was densely laden with ready-made bondage gear:  ball gags, facial harnesses, ring gags, slave collars, and leather manacles similar to the ones that were holding her secured to the steel table.  If Erin didn’t escape soon, it appeared she could look forward to an extended stay as a bondage toy for the Triton cult.

But that was easier said than done.  Erin pulled at her restraints with all her formidable strength but to little effect.  The cuffs securing her wrists and ankles had no play at all, and the straps around her waist and throat inhibited all but the smallest movements.  Her surfboard -- along with her Erin costume secreted inside -- waited just feet away, if only she could find a way to reach it.

The young avenger forced herself to relax, laying her head back on the cold table and closing her eyes as she contemplated her predicament.  In a way, she was fortunate that she had failed to activate her caplox devices during the abduction attempt.  Had the mermen identified her as Aquagirl she would likely have awakened in a much more lethal situation than she currently found herself in.  Still, there was no way she was going to get herself free from her restraints.  Her best hope to take control of the situation was to “persuade” her jailer to help her out.

Erin stilled her mind and began breathing deep and slow until her heartbeat leveled out.  By the time the craftsman returned some five minutes later, she once again appeared fully sedated.  The door opened with a hollow groan, and Erin suppressed a shiver as a cold wind whipped around her naked body.

“I’m back,” the man croaked as he brushed Erin’s face with the back of his hand. “Did you miss me, my dear?”

Erin, of course, said nothing, even as the man’s hand dipped to her right breast and teased her nipple.  Inwardly, though, her heart leapt.  Despite his statement that he had no interest “landsluts,” his actions betrayed his interest in her.  That could work to her advantage.

“Now for the fun part. We want the ovipositor to be nice and snug.”  Erin hung limply while she heard the man fumbling for something on the work bench, then she felt his cold hands on her close-cropped pussy.   A cold plastic rod was pressed against her nether lips, then slowly slipped inside her.

Erin seized the moment and let out a gentle coo, rocking her pelvis almost imperceptibly.

“Oh you like that do you?” The man smiled, foolishly taking the bait.

The man ran the rod deeper into Erin, prompting her to moan a bit more.  Entranced, the man pushed the rod slowly in and out of his prisoner, and was rewarded with a soft shudder of feigned pleasure.

“You’re a hot little slut aren’t you? How about this one.”  The rod disappeared from between her legs, only to be replaced a moment later by a much larger phallus.  Erin responded by gradually increasing her apparent enjoyment of the cold shaft, careful to slowly draw the man into the daring table dance for her freedom.

The man replaced the smooth shaft with a third even larger device, and Erin’s response was even more gratifying, as her hips gyrated and her chest rose and fell with her pronounced breathing.  Erin had never known any man that could endure her moves for long and, sure enough, she soon felt his cold wet mouth on her breast.  She knew that she was winning at the age-old game of seduction by a landslide, and finally opened her eyes sleepily to regard her “lover.”  The sight of him made her a bit sick to her stomach, but the success of her mission depended on a convincing performance so she forced back her feelings of revulsion and instead gave him another soft coo of pleasure.

He was the same sort of half breed that had captured her off Widow’s Point, and a quick inspection confirmed that he was a stunning mix of man and fish.  He had milky white hair and greenish skin like the others, and webbing across his fingers and toes.  At first it seemed as if he stared at her without ever blinking, but then Erin realized that the man had a SECOND eyelid like a frog, which was blinking normally but was crystal clear and would allow him to see perfectly underwater.  Further he had deep indentations on the side of his neck that could only be partial gills.

The only way such profound changes would be possible is through massive manipulation of the man’s genetic structure ways that modern scientists could only dream of.  This implied that there was almost certainly a criminal genius even more dangerous than Halflife at the center of the Triton cult.  But Erin had no time to consider such eventualities at the moment – she had to apply herself to the business of seducing the queer man that held the key to her freedom.

“You,” Erin whispered at last, “I want to feel you inside me.  Pleeasssse.”

The man suddenly looked down at her with unsettling intensity and for a moment Erin wondered if she hadn’t just pushed her hand too hard.  But she put on her best dreamy, half-conscious look and after a moment’s indecision, the man let out an primitive huff of agreement and unzipped his black jump suit.  Underneath he was naked, but his entire body showed the effects of unnatural genetic manipulation.  He was extremely tall and thin and his flesh had a dull, unhealthy sheen that almost looked as if he were developing scales.  His dick was small and underdeveloped, but what there was of it was standing at full attention.

“Take me now,” Erin bit her lower lip and flashed him her patented bedroom eyes. “I’ll do anything you want.”

The man was almost 6’5”, and with Erin at 5’8” and still strapped to the table there was somewhat of a mechanical problem with their coupling.  Erin did what she could to exacerbate the situation, tilting her pelvis back as far as she could manage and squeezing her thighs together as tightly as she could.  Yet all the time she urged the man on and echoed his frustration at being unable to enter her.  Soon the man was on the verge of sexual frenzy.

“My legs,” Erin whimpered, as if she were about to climax herself. “Untie my legs.”

The man was beyond thinking as his hands groped Erin’s stunning body, and he instantly reached for his key chain while fumbling with her ankle manacles.  She was careful to rub her warm, perfumed muff against the side of his head even as the man released the pad locks and removed the chains holding her on the table.

“Thank god,” Erin whispered with genuine appreciation.  With an oily-slick motion she raised her legs as if she were about to clamp them around the disgusting fish-man, but instead she brought both her feet in between herself and her jailer. “Now get the hell off me!”

Erin uncoiled like a spring, sending the surprised creep flying across the room and against the workbench with explosive force.  For a moment he seemed to survive the savage blow unscathed, but even as he tried to take a step forward his legs failed him and he slumped to the floor like a rag doll.  Several spurts of semen shot from the man’s diminutive cock, then he was still.

“I love a man that like to play rough,” Erin smiled as she piked upward with her legs like a gymnast on the rings going into a handstand.  She rolled up onto a precarious perch atop the table balanced on her toes with her hands still manacled at her sides.  Her wrists were still chained, but now that she was above the restraints reaching down it was a simple matter to grab the screw-locking “O” rings that secured her cuffs to the table and set herself free.  She then dropped to the floor like a cat and grabbed several sets of handcuffs from the pegboard, securing the fish-man in a hog tie on the floor.

“I hope he still respects me in the morning.”

Erin laid down her surfboard and removed the false bottom, exposing the secret compartment containing her Aquagirl costume and utility belt.

“Yes!”

Erin eagerly shed her cover as the hapless victim of the Triton Cult and slipped into the yellow and black body suit and glossy hose that identified her as Aquagirl, beautiful and fearless defender of Oceanis.  To the basic outfit she added short rubberized gloves, thigh-length boots, a waist-length cape, and her partial cowl with its integrated visor that also served as a versatile dive mask.  Lastly, she buckled her utility belt into place and loaded it with Vargas’ latest crime fighting gear.  In less than four minutes her transformation into Aquagirl was complete.

“Not quite how I had planned it,” Aquagirl admitted as she placed her hands on her hips and looked around. “but at least I’ve infiltrated Lord Triton’s ship.  There’s just one small problem: no Coast Guard.”

Beyond the fact that she was alone without no backup, the situation was much more bizarre and dangerous than Aquagirl had initially thought.  She had believed that this was simply a case of a doomsday cult that was trying to bring about a natural disaster to fulfill their egocentric leader’s otherwise pathetic prophesies.  That would have been dangerous enough, given that the cult had enlisted the aid of Halflife to carry out the calamity, but the appearance of these strange genetically altered mermen added a new wrinkle to the unfolding drama.  They clearly had once been normal humans (as her Romeo could attest) and still wore dive suits for warmth while underwater, but their physiology had been modified to adapt them to the aquatic world.  Apparently, the cult of Lord Triton was more than just a doomsday cult.  They were involved in some sort of twisted cross-breeding between humans and marine life.  And apparently many of the recruits were not volunteers.

Still, her mission from this point was clear.  She had to signal the authorities about her location and then try to find Halflife’s bomb and prevent the cult from setting it off until help could arrive.  Based on Vargas’ assessment of the situation, one more deep nuclear detonation within the undersea chasm known as Lucifer’s Rift and Oceanis could be destroyed in a wave of massive earthquakes. Aquagirl was not looking forward to another encounter with Halflife, but she would need to find some way to outsmart him if she hoped to save the city.

“Time to call in the cavalry.”  The young vigilante opened one of the compartments of her utility belt and withdrew a small electronic transmitter.  By securing it to a steel beam that comprised part of the ship’s hull, she could use the entire vessel as a huge antenna to send a distress message back to Vargas at the Institute.  With any luck Vargas could mobilize the coast guard in a matter of hours.

“Now to find that bomb.”

Another dip into her utility belt produced a miniature Geiger counter.  She had brought the device along specifically to track down the bomb.  It would tell her how far away the device was and in what general direction. As soon as she activated the counter, the small speaker in the ear of her cowl let loose with a stream of soft clicks indicating that the bomb was easy to detect.  It was 15 meters north and another 20 meters straight down, somewhere deep in the hold of the ship.

Making her way through the ship had turned out to be surprisingly easy.  The vessel itself was no more than 20 years old and in good repair.  From long experience with seagoing vessels, Aquagirl could ascertain that it was likely a packet ship or a tender of some sort and that she was somewhere up in the superstructure, perhaps not far from the bridge.  The dimly lit halls were narrow but thankfully unguarded.  In fact, she didn’t happen upon a single soul on board, giving her the strange feeling that she was on some of ghost ship.  It was more likely, however, that since the ship was actually a floating temple, matters of mystical ritual actually superseded the principals of sound seamanship (not to mention proper care of their drugged prisoners).  The amphibious daredevil was tempted to try to locate the bridge of the ship where she learn more about their position, but her destiny lay on a more perilous course.  Aquagirl was forced to bypass the bridge in favor of something infinitely more practical: a stairwell.

As a commercial ship only recently converted for the use of a monomaniacal cult, it was a simple matter to find the stairwell by following the indicator signs over the hatchways.  It was separated from the hallway by a watertight door, which Aquagirl worked open as quietly as she could.  The stairs beyond were narrow and steep -- really more of a ladder than a proper stairway -- working over and back down into the darkness.  Aquagirl descended quickly but silently, glancing occasionally at the small Geiger counter to note that the distance between her and radiation source.  As she neared the bottom, she finally caught the tell-tale signs of another human being.  Time to kick some ass.

Working a bit more recklessly than usual, Aquagirl leapt down the final staircase and caught the lone guard completely by surprise.  It was another tall, gaunt man with the same wide reptilian eyes, milky white hair and extremely thin build as the man she had cold cocked in the workshop.  He too wore a black jumpsuit but in addition he wore a weapons belt bearing a radio, cuffs, a walkie-talkie, and a baton.  He also wore an emblem over his left breast, the head of a grotesque man that was half-man, half-octopus.  Aquagirl had seen the disturbing symbol before: on the altar back at the church where she had first encountered Halflife.

The man stood at attention beside a heavy steel door that was clearly not part of the ship’s original design.  Beside the door was a small control panel and beneath it was a clear plate that covered some sort of laser sensor like a grocery store scanner.

“A landslut!” the man recoiled in surprise.

“I prefer the name Aquagirl,” the caped cutie noted with a smirk. “And I suppose that fingerprint scanner will work whether you’re conscious on not.”

“You die!”

The man went for his gun, but Aquagirl was too quick, knocking it out of his hand even as it cleared the holster.  The man then lunged for her, but the young dynamo ducked nimbly to one side and brought her knee up hard into his midsection.  He doubled over in pain and Aquagirl took the opportunity to do a double karate chop over the back of his head to end the fight almost as soon as it started.  The fish-man slumped to the floor and was still, making it a simple matter for Aquagirl to secure the man with his own handcuffs.

True to her word, Aquagirl seized the unconscious guard and dragged him to the security door, placing his clammy webbed hand on the scanning panel.  To her satisfaction the light over the panel went from red to green and the grinding of steel on steel indicated that the dead bolts securing the hatch were withdrawing.  As soon as the door snapped open Aquagirl crept inside, pulling the guard in behind her.

Beyond the door was what seemed to an auxiliary control deck for the ship – a backup bridge – at the moment unoccupied and dimly lit.  However, this room had several distinctive features that made it unique from the other engineering bridges she had seen on commercial vessels.  The most obvious was that one wall had been stripped free of its traditional bank of control consoles and replaced with a thick Plexiglas wall that ran from the floor to ceiling, looking into what would have been the main cargo hold.  Beyond the wall was what seemed to be an extension of the control room, complete with active control stations.  But the room on the other side of the glass was water-filled, with an open breathing space between the surface of the water and the steel deck overhead. This strange arrangement gave both air and water breathers the opportunity to control the ship.

The second interesting feature was the large circular hatchway that commanded the center of the room, currently closed off by a steel iris.  The opening was over a meter in diameter and ringed with a steel lip that protruded 30 centimeters above the tiled deck.  Hanging from an overhead crane directly above the iris was what appeared to be a small submersible shaped like a box kite of black steel and foam rubber padding.  Based on the radiation warning signs stamped onto the silver sphere at the base of the machine, Aquagirl had undoubtedly found Halflife’s final bomb, complete with a high-tech guidance system to steer it deep into Lucifer’s Rift to ensure a cataclysmic detonation.  The hatch below the bomb, therefore, was certainly an ejection portal, like a vertical torpedo tube.

And the shapely crime fighter noticed one other thing: each entrance to the room was protected by heavy water-tight doors that would be virtually impossible to open once activated.  Now, watertight hatches were standard equipment for ships this close to the waterline, but they assumed a special significance in a guarded room that was being used to store nuclear weapons.  They could easily be triggered by motion detectors in the room or by pressure plates set into the floor, but once activated the room would be virtually inescapable until the doors were opened from the outside.  If Aquagirl wanted to reach the bomb, she would have to voluntarily walk into a solid steel trap.

Briefly, the young heroine’s mind wandered back to the last of Halflife’s traps she had fallen into.  It was difficult to voluntarily put herself in a situation where she would likely get to enjoy his hospitality a second time.  But once the cultists learned that she was aboard they would almost certainly move with all haste to drop the bomb.  Her best chance to save the city would be to disable the weapon now before it could be deployed.  It would be up to fate to determine what happened from there.

“Why is it always up to me to save the world?” Aquagirl sighed, and she stepped into the room

WAHHH! WAHHH! W AHHH!

As expected, the moment Aquagirl entered the room the trap was sprung.   An intermittent security buzzer sounded and the flood doors whipped shut behind her.  All around the room, the other exits were similarly sealed off behind plates of steel as all of the control consoles went dark and the overhead lights went from white to deep red.  Worse yet, as soon as the doors were sealed the sprinkler system began flooding the room with a billowing gas that quickly collected at Aquagirl’s feet like heavy ground fog.  The mist was ice cold to the touch and diffused the room with the sickly sweet odor of cheap mouthwash.  She was not familiar with the kind of gas flooding the room, but if the dart used in her capture were any indicator, it certainly would not be a pleasant experience.

“Hope you’re on the way soon Vargas.”  Aquagirl took at final deep breath of only slightly tainted air then headed for the bomb.

Or at least she tried to.

When Aquagirl attempted to take a step forward she found that her coordination had all but left her.  Her legs felt like lead and even as she lurched ponderously forward she lost her balance and fell of the floor.  With a growing sense of alarm the sexy avenger regained her feet and willed herself forward.  Her muscles responded only grudgingly, allowing her a few Frankenstein steps forward before she toppled again to the shrouded floor.  Desperately Aquagirl tried to regain her feet, but the effort required was enormous.  It was as if the gravity in the room had quadrupled and she ultimately was forced back to her knees.  The bomb, not 4 meters away, suddenly seemed infinitely distant.  The deadly fog, now lit bloody red by the overhead lighting, was rapidly sapping her strength even as it left her mental faculties untouched.  Regardless, Aquagirl refused to give up, crawling on her hands and knees towards Halflife’s doomsday machine.  If she couldn’t reach the bomb, her sacrifice would be for nothing.

“Why Miss O’Neal, your persistence never ceases to amaze me,” boomed a powerful British voice that sent chills down Aquagirl’s spine like fingernails across a chalkboard.  “I have it from VERY reliable testimony that you are dead, yet here you appear in the aft bridge, plotting to make off with my bomb.”

The voice was unmistakable: it was Dr Simon Halifax, a former professor at Ocean State and Erin’s former undergraduate advisor.  It was Dr Halifax’s tampering with the genetics of aquatic life that ultimately led to the destruction of his own humanity.  It was Dr Halifax that forced Erin to first don the mask of Aquagirl to thwart his deranged plans for revenge on all humanity for crimes against the sea.  The last time she had seen her former teacher had been on the deck of a burning freighter loaded with biotoxins that he had intended to pilot into the Santa Verdes Bay.  Aquagirl had just barely managed to avert disaster, sending both ship and man to the bottom of the ocean.

“Halifax,” Aquagirl spat.  There seemed to be no point in holding her breath any longer -- the chemical was penetrating directly through her skin.  “I never figured you as the type who would hang out with a toxic waste dump like Halflife.”

“On the contrary, I find his company most reassuring.  After all, we monsters need to stick together.  Turn around.”

Aquagirl had assumed that Halifax was addressing her through the ship’s pubic address system, safely outside of the deadly room.  She was at least partially right, for Halifax stood regarding her from the safety of the water filled room beyond the Lucite wall.  But the corruption of his own genetic code had converted the once-dignified college professor into a ghastly amphibious horror.  He now stood over 15 feet tall, with most of his body draped in hairy green moss that waved in the water.  His skin had assumed a grayish-brown hue and his huge bloated head was now hairless with wide staring eyes and shriveled ears.  Yet the gross distorted features still bore a disturbing resemblance to the man she had once known and his voice was unmistakable.  The lovely heroine was suddenly sick to her stomach at the site of what had become of her nemesis.

“My god! No!” Aquagirl forced herself to her feet and attempted to back away from the Lucite wall. But her legs quickly failed her and she fell on her butt, still attempting to scuttle away.

“As you can see, the years have not been kind.  But they have not been nearly so cruel as your stay with us will be on you.”

“You … you’re Lord Triton. “

“Yes,” Halifax croaked, “the Drowned God, the father of the Sea People.”

“What…. What have you done to these people?”  The effect of the gas was now spreading to Aquagirl’s arms.  It was growing more and more difficult to even keep her head above the fog covering the ground.

“You shall find out soon enough.  I would worry more about what I am doing to you. Are you enjoying my little gas trap?”

“Yes its quite … quite … relaxing.”  Relaxing to the most maddening extent possible.  The bomb was still some 5 feet away, just beyond reach, and her strength was rapidly abandoning her.

“I’m glad you are enjoying it.  It is a distillation of manta ray and man-o-war venom.  It completely paralyzes the muscles while leaving the victim perfectly alert.  And quite susceptible to pain.”

With a chill Aquagirl realized that Halifax was telling the truth.  Her nerves were still completely in tact – she could feel the floor beneath her butt and the cold breath of the gas on her hose-clad thighs.  Her limbs were perfectly functional – they just seemed to weigh a ton!  Once the gas completed its work she would be perfectly alert yet totally helpless.  Chest heaving from the exertion, the doomed vigilante rolled to her back and planted her feet, lifting her butt off the floor.  She was gratified when her slick rubber-clad body slipped easily along the surface of the floor.  Another foot closer to the bomb...

“I knew you would attempt to intervene in my affairs eventually, Erin, so I took the precaution of equipping my floating temple with several anti-Aquagirl traps.  My followers have inadvertently set them off on a number of occasions so I can attest that the gas you are absorbing through your skin is quite lethal.”

“Glad to know you still … think of me … after all these years, doc.”

Now completely immersed in the sea of blood red fog, Aquagirl’s body was beginning to quiver and convulse as the fiendish chemical permeated her system.  Given the complete clarity of her senses the effect was tantamount to the being trapped in the strictest bondage even as she lay sprawled completely unfettered on the floor. The sense of utter vulnerability that accompanies strict bondage washed through her, but it was mixed with the knowledge that she yet had some control over her destiny.  Reaching deep into reserves she didn’t know she had, Aquagirl raised her legs and again inched closer.

“Think of you Miss O’Neal?” Lord Triton reached down to one of the submerged consoles and pressed a button that would summon a security team to the aft bridge.  “Why it was you that liberated me from my antisocial ways of thinking.  I thought I was outcast and alone, with nothing to gain but vengeance.  But you showed me the errors in my ways.  Now I realize that I am not alone, merely the first of many.”

There was no response from Aquagirl, and Triton watched patiently from the safety of the adjacent chamber as the fog continued billowing into the room, forming a toxic sea from which there was no escape.  It was impossible to tell just where in the cloud Aquagirl was, but it was enough to know that she was in there somewhere.  The gas would completely incapacitate her in less than a minute.  In four, her autonomous system would begin to suffer – impacting her breathing, heartbeat, and brain functionality. In five, Aquagirl would be dead of total muscle paralysis and revenge would be his.  But that was too merciful.

After waiting for 4 minutes and 15 seconds, Triton pressed another button on his console that turned off the gas and substituted it with cold seawater.  The water-soluble vapor quickly condensed out of the air and took the form of a soapy scum on top of the rivulets of water running quickly down the drains in the floor.  The lights went from red to white again and the hellish fantasy world that had been the gas trap was now just the aft bridge again, complete with control consoles, nuclear bomb ejection station ... and a completely paralyzed Aquagirl.

The amphibious daredevil was laying on her back a short distance from the bomb, with her arms at her sides and her head lolled toward Lord Triton.  Her dreamy blue eyes were open and occasional slow blinks betrayed that she was still alive and conscious.  But her sleek, athletic body was eerily motionless, as if she were already a corpse.  Even her breathing was all but nonexistent.

“The chamber is clean, my children,” Triton spoke into a com box mounted on the wall.  “Please bind our guest and prepare her for the Symbiot.”

Within the room, the completely powerless Aquagirl could only watch as the swamp monster horror that had once been her undergraduate college advisor drank in the site of his helpless enemy, then reached over to speak something unintelligible into a nearby intercom.  A moment later she heard an unseen door open with a loud crash, followed by the thud of boots on tile.  The tread of heavy feet grew louder and louder until finally there was silence. Then there was a loud FLOP as a tangle of ropes, cords, straps and steel fittings landed on the floor before her eyes.  With a quiver of horror-tinged excitement she recognized it as heavy bondage gear.

Aquagirl felt a hand grab her shoulder tightly as she was rolled to her back. A ring of men swam into view, all clad in chemical suits with artificial breathing apparatus to ward off any chance exposure to the compound that already coursed through Aquagirl’s slim body.  As the men prepared a heavy rubber singleglove and cruel-looking facial harness one thing was clear: Triton wanted to constantly remind Aquagirl that she was completely powerless.  Boy, was he in for a surprise.

FFFFAM!

The guards flew in all directions as a geyser of sparks and thick black smoke sprang from the bomb.  Despite their heavy black chemical suits, high-tech shock weapons, and visored faces they looked comical as they fought each other to get through the door, fearing a radiation leak.  Lord Triton bellowed at them from the other side of the wall, ordering them to stay in the room and protect the bomb from any additional damage but he might as well have been shouting orders to the Keystone cops.  Only the fire protection system succeeded where Triton’s threats had failed.  The smoke gushing from the bomb finally set the sprinklers for real, causing the water-tight doors to again slide shut sealing the last few storm troopers inside the room with Aquagirl.

The cool water felt wonderful on Aquagirl’s upturned face as she lay peacefully in the midst of the chaos.  She would have laughed her ass off except, of course, that she still couldn’t move a muscle.

* *

“That bitch!” Lord Triton spat, beside himself with rage.  “How could she have done this?”

Back in the aft bridge of Triton’s temple-ship, the seaweed-draped villain paced furiously behind his wall of Lucite while Halflife surveyed the damage done to the bomb.  At first glance, the device seemed to be completely in tact, other than the thin layer of sooty grime.  A closer inspection, however, revealed the true target of Aquagirl’s handiwork: the heavy aluminum circuit box mounted on the fuselage directly behind the spherical bomb.

“Thermite charge,” Halflife intoned with his characteristic disinterest. “Small and difficult to detect.  She must have placed it on the bomb even as you gloated over her capture.”

“Spare me your insolence, Halflife! I’m not in a tolerant mood. Can you repair it?”

“The circuit board for the guidance system is destroyed.  It would be a simple matter to replace it in my workshop …”

“If AQUAGIRL hadn’t already turned your workshop over to the police!” Triton bellowed.

“Yes.”

Lord Triton resumed his furious pacing, as Halflife returned his attention to the bomb.  The metallic casing over the computer was pocked and warped by exposure to the molten metal created by the Thermite reaction.  Within the box, the wiring and circuit boards were a charred mess.  It didn’t take an evil super-genius to see that the computer was ruined.

“So what are our options?” Triton said at last, turning his massive head to lock his gaze on Halflife.

“ I could have new machining equipment shipped from Rotterdam, as before.  The process should required eight weeks.”

“We haven’t got eight weeks!  If Aquagirl is here, then Dr Vargas knows about us as well.  The authorities could descend on us at any moment.”

“No one knows she is here.”

“Ohhh? And how can you be so sure?”

Halflife reached into a pouch on his belt and drew out a small silver box bearing the rearing seahorse insignia of Aquagirl.  Triton recognized it at once.

“Aquagirl’s long wave radio beacon!  How did you find it?”

“Lets just say my sensitivities extend to realms beyond those of mortal men.”

“Could Vargas have determined our position prior to your discovering her emergency beacon?”

“No, Vargas would have to use a triangulation technique similar to mine, and I was considerably closer the beacon.  Aquagirl is yours to dispose of as you see fit.”

“Excellent,” Triton seemed to relax for the first time since Aquagirl’s charge had crippled his nuclear bomb. “It seems my revenge against Erin O’Neal is finally at hand. ”

“May I ask what you intend to do with her?”

Triton smiled as he replied.  “I’ve recently perfected the Encephaline Symbiot, a highly contagious microscopic organism that attacks the human brain, causing horrific pain and reducing its victims to crazed animals.  I plan to inject Aquagirl with a massive dose of the Symbiot, then release her to the world authorities as an example of the price that they will pay if they resist me.”

“Intriguing.  But I have an alternative that might solve both our problems.”

“BOTH problems?”

“Yes, I replace the damaged circuit card and you get to damn Aquagirl to a cruel death.”

“Just what are you proposing?”

Halflife screeched and screeched, apparently laughing uncontrollably at his own unfathomable jest.  And the joke was almost certainly on Aquagirl.

“Meet me in your workshop amidships.  I will show you.”

* *

“Nothing!” Dr Vargas bellowed, as he pounded his meaty fists on the table. “Signal is gone.”

Vargas had been tracking Aquagirl’s low-power emergency beacon for approximately 15 minutes.  The long-wave signal had been weak, so isolating his ward’s location had been quite a problem.  Fortunately, he had been able to narrow down his field of search significantly.  He knew that her objective had been to find the ship being used by the Triton cultists to deploy Halflife’s nuclear bombs, so he was able to narrow down his field of search to the waters immediately around the fault line know as Lucifer’s Rift.  Further, he knew that the next bomb would have to be a deep detonation in order to trigger a cataclysmic earthquake, so he focused his antennas on the parts of the rift that he knew ran deepest.  He had been rewarded by a tremendous amplification of the signal, so he knew that he was close.  Unfortunately, just as he was homing in on the location of the emergency beacon, the signal went dead, and none of the adjustments he made could coax it back to life.  Aquagirl was no longer transmitting.

“That last time I let that girl go surfing without bazooka.”  Vargas leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his belly, staring absently at the bank of computer monitors running along the ceiling of the control room.  They all showed the underwater topology along Lucifer’s rift but at varying levels of resolution and all featured a flashing red blob that showed the best estimate he had of Aquagirl’s last known location.  It was too large – hundreds of square miles of open ocean and all in international waters.  It could be searched given time, but time is one luxury he didn’t have.  And even if they did find the ship, what chance did a crew of 19-year-old Coast Guard sailors have against a primal force like Halflife?

“Little Pichayana is but twenty and one,” Vargas reminded himself.  He almost always referred to Erin by his pet name for her – Little Piranha.  “If she is lost, we all better start swimming.”

Suddenly his eyes lit up. And he leaned forward in his chair. “Swimming!  Yes, swimming!”

The 70-year old Vargas sprang out of his chair, seized one of his specialized Aquagirl emergency kits, and tottered across the control room.  It was a long walk to the surface and Vargas, not for the first time, curse his decision to locate his lair in such a secluded part of the Institute.  He had to stop several times to rest, but finally the sun broke upon his face as he emerged from a stairwell into the maze of open-air training tanks.  With a mounting sense of urgency he approached the huge aquarium that held the Institute’s two prized performers, the killer whales Drako and Niko.  As usual, the two whales were circling at the bottom of the tank.

Vargas set the pillow-sized emergency kit on the low cement wall surrounding the pool and picked up the largest half-frozen fish he could find in the trainer’s bucket, holding it out distastefully to the whale.

“Drako, to me,” Vargas snapped.  The two whales ignored him and continued swimming at the bottom of the tank.

“DRAKO!  HERE!”  The whale ignored Vargas, and his huge stiff fish.

“DRAKO! This instant!” Nothing.

“Insolent ... blubber butted …  pea brained … imbecile!” Vargas fumed and finally threw the fish into the water.  Slowly he bent down to pick up his cane. “I should have known better than to ask a bully like to you help find Erin.”

Vargas turned and began the long hobble back to his lab when he heard the sound like water rushing from the slopes of a mountain as it ascended from the sea.  Vargas turned around in time to see Drako, the front portion of his body now fully 10 feet out of the water, snapping his jaws shut around the tasty morsel.  He descended only slowly and then let out a deep huff as he awaited what Vargas had to say.

“Oh, now you want talk? You think you a real tough fish, ehh? How you like bully someone bad for change, ‘stead of those who want help you?”

“Erin is in trouble,” Vargas turned and laid his cane back on the wall. “Erin! You know …” Vargas placed his hands stiffly at his sides and assumed an approximation of the pose Erin struck when nose diving off Drako’s snout. “She out there, somewhere.”  Vargas pointed out to the open sea. “You find her and bring her home. Understand?”

Drako let out a long rumble from the depths of his huge body. “Good, I take that as ‘yes.’”

Vargas moved to the trainers control panel and inserted his master key that gave his access to every device and computer system owned by the Oceanic Institute.  Then he pressed the large red button that opened the emergency sluice gate that led to the open ocean.  It was normally only to be used only when the whale’s lives were in danger, but now if was Erin’s life that hung in the balance.   “Now, you find Erin.  No go searching of cute single lady whales. You married to Niko.”

Vargas leaned on his cane and turned to face the enormous whale once more.  “Director … Director going to kill me for this.  Assuming, of course, there is still Institute left to direct.”

Wheezing from the unaccustomed effort, Vargas picked up the black nylon emergency bag and armed the implantation charge on one of its interior straps.  Then with great effort he threw the heavy bag up on Drako’s enormous back.  There was a sharp POP as the charge went off and set a hook firmly into the 2 feet of blubber that lined the leviathan’s back.  The procedure was completely painless to Drako, but the hook would ensure that the bag stayed firmly anchored on his back until he reached his destination.

“Now go, bring back Erin, before I make you lamp oil.”

With a final low rumble Drako descended into the depths of the aquarium.  Then he slipped through the sluice gate and out into the open ocean.  The water was clear and blue but in less than a minute Drako had disappeared into the depths.

It wasn’t much of a cavalry, but it was the best Aquagirl was going to get.

* * *

“Mhhhh! MHHHH!”

Unlike her previous accommodations on Triton’s steel examination table, Aquagirl now found herself in the type of restraints she had grown more accustomed to during her dangerous career as a masked vigilante.  Her costume had been removed and replaced with a rubber catsuit similar to the one she was being fitted for shortly before her initial escape from Triton’s workshop.  Unlike her earlier generic version, however, her current costume was designed to somewhat resemble her Aquagirl costume with thigh-length high heeled boots and long rubber gloves that were fused permanently to the catsuit material beneath.  Her Aquagirl belt was back around her waist, though now devoid of all its equipment except the caplox devices, and for good reason: her cowl had been replaced with a rubber bondage helmet with integrated ball gag that completely enveloped her head.

Aquagirl was suspended in the midst of a cylindrical tank by means of heavy chains secured to custom-fit steel manacles at her wrists and ankles.  The clear tank had no door and was completely filled with what appeared to be bluish water.  Several black cables were attached to the vanquished vigilante at the forearm, chest, and inner thigh and medical monitoring equipment flanked her to either side.  The fluid was warm and highly oxygenated and the rubber costume fit her like a sensuous second skin, but Aquagirl had no delusions about the true purpose of the elaborate device: it was a torture chamber, pure and simple.

“So, I see our pretty little guest is ready for her final ordeal,” Amphitrite sneered as she entered the clean, brightly lit biotech lab where Aquagirl hung suspended. “I must admit heavy bondage becomes you Aquagirl.”

The voice was distorted and far off, but Aquagirl betrayed that she could hear her captors taunt perfectly well by halting her delightful but utterly hopeless struggling and moaning angrily through her gag.

“Lord Triton designed this chamber specifically for you, Aquagirl.  I think you’ll find it completely inescapable, though in only minutes escape will be pointless.”  Amphitrite held out a hand towards one of her guards. “The symbiot, please.”

The man quickly place a large vial in his mistresses hand.  “I know you can’t see it Aquagirl, but I hold in my hand Lord Triton’s most fiendish invention, the Encephaline Symbiot.  It’s a microbe that attacks the base of the brain, causing blinding pain that quickly erodes all other higher centers of the brain.   In only hours you’ll be a mindless animal, responding to only your most primal instincts: hunger, fear, lust.  We will deliver you to the United Nations as an example of the fate that awaits the entire world if anyone dares to interfere with the hegemony of the Sea People. ”

“Mhhhh!” Aquagirl’s muscles danced beneath the thin rubber of her costume as she pulled against the heavy chains with all her might, but to no avail.  She had no doubt that Halifax could develop such a microbe and yet was completely powerless to prevent his from using her as a human guinea pig.  She could only pray that Vargas would arrive with the Coast Guard in time to save the city, but it looked like he would arrive too late to save Aquagirl.  A shiver ran through her body at the thought of her complete helplessness.

“Now I see you’re getting the idea.  Pity I can’t keep you around for my own personal amusement, but business is business.  Load the injector.”

One of the attending technicians took the vial in her hand and screwed it into a socket in one of the medical machines near the chamber containing the shapely avenger.   Within her liquid trap, Aquagirl heard the tinkle of glass on steel and pulled with all her strength as she realized that she was only press of a button away from death.  Amphitrite savored the sight of her sexy enemies erotic struggles, shuddering inwardly as she imagined herself in Aquagirl’s place, completely sheathed in rubber, chained in custom-fit bondage and floating in a chamber that was precisely calibrated to her body temperature.

But then the door to the lab opened and a female messenger entered. “Mistress Amphitrite, if I may speak.”

“Can’t you see I’m BUSY!” Her eyes shot daggers and the fish-girl.

“Begging your pardon, Mistress, but I have a message from Lord Triton.”

“Very well,” the demented priestess sighed. “Don’t go away Aquagirl, I’ll be right back!”

Within the tank, Aquagirl could hear the two conversing, but their voices were too soft and distorted to make out.   But their exchange was brief and in a moment Amphitrite returned to address her prisoner.

“Sorry Aquagirl, change of plans.  Lord Triton wants to speak with you immediately.”

“Mhhhh!” Aquagirl shot back angrily, as the technician injected her with a powerful tranquilizer rather than the Symbiot that would have. She knew that she should be horrified, since if Triton was sparing her life it was only to doom her to an even crueler fate. Still it was one more moment of life and one more moment for Vargas to arrive with the Coast Guard.  Then the moment was gone and Aquagirl faded quickly off to oblivion.

* * *

It seemed as if only moments before Aquagirl was awakened from peaceful darkness to once again confront the nightmare that had become her real life. She immediately recognized her surroundings – she was back in the aft bridge of Triton’s ship.  She still wore the skintight rubber catsuit that Amphitrite had dressed her in before sealing her in the torture chamber, though the bondage hood and ball gag had been removed and replaced with a steel collar bearing locking grooves for a diver’s helmet.  The steel manacles were still secured to her wrists and ankles and her arms were locked behind her back.

“Welcome, Aquagirl.  Did you like your new costume?”

“Very comfy.  But the accessories are a bit … snug.”

The room was not much different from how she remembered it some 12 hours earlier.  The bomb still hung in its carriage over the vertical torpedo tube and the grime had been cleaned away.  Something looked oddly different about it, but the blonde avenger couldn’t take the time for a thorough inspection. Triton stood before her in his grotesque immensity immediately on the other side of the Lucite wall, and the equally terrible Halflife stood beside the bomb.  She also quickly noted that the terminals on both sides of the wall were now manned by Triton’s fishy followers.

“Indeed, but I feel you look your best when tightly trussed and facing imminent death.”

“So how many people have you abducted for your sick experiments, Halifax?”

“Aquagirl, you wound me,” Triton put his hand to his chest. “I have brought no one here against their will, even you.  It seems everyone wants to be part of a greater cause.”

“Greater cause?  What greater cause?”

“Well, isn’t it obvious?  I’m creating the next masters of the earth. My genetic merger process produces the ideal mix of man and amphibian. And soon my progeny shall control the world. ”

“You make me sick Dr Halifax.”

Triton looked at her for a moment then chuckled.  “Dr Halifax if dead my dear, he drowned in the ship that you blew out from under him.  Erin O’Neal is dead to me as well.  Now it is only Lord Triton and Aquagirl. I prefer it that way.  Take her to the bomb.”

The guards led the struggling young avenger toward the waiting bomb.  Aquagirl tried to question Triton further, partially to pry for information and partially to stall for time.

“You have your offspring, and you have you killer microbe, so why destroy the city?”

“Now you’re wrong on two counts.  I don’t want to destroy Oceanis I want to sink it.  After all, what better place to claim as my new capital than the city supposedly protected by the mighty Aquagirl.  Unfortunately you’ve done a bit of damage to Halflife’s final bomb, so I have a proposition for you.”

With that he pressed a button and Aquagirl gasped in surprise as several lights came on within the confines of the bomb.  Most of the bombs components had been removed; all that remained in the rectangular frame of the device was the large sphere of the nuclear bomb at the base and the high-tech maneuvering jets on top.  The control computers and circuitry had all been replaced by a simple set of black aluminum joysticks mounted on the frame just below the steerable fans.  And secured to the frame just above the manual controllers were chains almost identical to the ones that had held Aquagirl securely in the torture chamber.  The sexy avenger felt of tingle of hopeless warmth spreading out from her pussy as she got her first glimpse of the fate Triton had in mind for her.

“You see the guidance computer was completely destroyed by your little bomb.  It would take Halflife weeks to build a replacement, but then a thought struck me: who is better at piloting an underwater craft than Aquagirl?”

“You want ME to help you destroy Oceanis.  Never!”

“I’m afraid you have little choice, my dear.  We will drop you into one of the wider parts of Lucifer’s Rift.  The controls will be frozen until you are already over 600 meters deep.  Even if you could manage to detonate the bomb immediately you would still trigger an earthquake strong enough to destroy the city, even though it might not sink outright.  Your only hope to save Oceanis is to outlast the bomb.”

“Outlast the bomb?” Aquagirl asked stunned.

“Yes,” Halflife approached the rubber-clad heroine. “The aluminum casing on the bomb is precisely 5.5 centimeters thick and filled with air.  Can you estimate at what depth the shell will rupture.”

Aquagirl thought for a moment. “7800 meters.”

“Very good, my thought as well. But the rift is actually a full 8,500 meters deep at the point where we will drop you.”

“But no human can survive at that depth.  The pressure would be thousands of pounds per square inch.”

“Indeed.  Your own skull will rupture long before you shatter the casing for the bomb.  Your bones will implode and your bloodstream will be a river of liquefied toxic gases.  Quite an unpleasant death.”

“Yes,” Triton continued. “No mortal human could possibly survive long enough to steer the bomb to the bottom on the Rift.  But with your unique breathing capabilities, you could theoretically survive for a brief period even at 8,500 meters.  And if you can maneuver the bomb to that depth then you will die knowing you saved Oceanis yet again. Gentleman, help our guest aboard.”

 “I don’t think my dive computer goes down to 8500 meters,” Aquagirl quipped as her guards lifted her up into the open cage-like space between the bomb housing and the overhead maneuvering fans.  The chains for her manacles were securely bolted to the boxy frame of the device while the soles of her boots rested on the sphere of the bomb itself.  “Is this going to require a decompression stop coming up?”

Halflife cackled like a TV set to a dead channel.

“You never cease to amuse me, Aquagirl.  I wish all my victims were as cocky as you.”

“There will be no ‘coming up’ for your Aquagirl,” Triton’s smiled disappeared. “ Except as a gust of radioactive vapor.  The only question is how are you going to die – quickly in a nuclear fireball, or slowly in the crushing depths of the blackest abyss.”

“You know me,” Aquagirl said as her manacles were secured to the heavy chains, “I always root for the underdog.”

Once their shapely prisoner was secured a final guard produced a sleek black helmet with a visor tinted red like Aquagirl’s own cowl.  He locked it in place on her steel collar and opened a small valve at her temple that flooded the helmet with optically correcting solution.  Where she was going, even the slightest air pocket would cause even the strongest visor to shatter like cheap plastic.  Aquagirl allowed the inert fluid to fill her windpipe and lungs while the technician activated several red lamps in the helmet that cast a harsh glare on her youthful, suntanned features.  Now that breathing was out of the question she brought the caplox devices on line and felt the familiar rush as the enriched oxygen flooded into her body with twice the efficiency of her mortal lungs.

“There now,” Triton gloated.  “All ready for your final plunge.  Are we in position?”

“Directly over the drop point, my master,” replied a man at the controls.

“Excellent. Flood the launch tube.”

Beneath Aquagirl’s feet she could hear the sound of steel on steel and then a rush of incoming seawater.  When the water had ceased flowing, another grating sound announced the opening of the metal iris immediately beneath the bomb. The pool of water immediately beneath the iris still churned from the recent influx of water.

“Oh and one more thing, Aquagirl,” Triton smiled. “If you are holding out any hopes of rescue you can put them aside. Halflife has something to show you.”

Aquagirl turned to see the nuclear nightmare holding a small gleaming metal device in his filthy outstretched hand.  Her heart sank when she recognized it as her own emergency transmitter.

Triton smiled at the expression of recognition and shock in his doomed prisoner’s strikingly beautiful face.  “No one can possibly save you now, Aquagirl.  You will save Oceanis from destruction, or you will cause it.  And if you are still harboring any delusions of outwitting me, then know that the bomb beneath you will activate at the same time your controls activate.  If for any reason the bomb again ascends to a depth of less than 150 meters, it will automatically detonate.”

Aquagirl struggled against her chains with a new-found sense of desperation, to Lord Tritons great pleasure.  Now she knew that no rescue mission was coming, she was completely alone against Triton, Halflife, and the entire cult of the Sea People.  Saving herself was out of the question, but if she could maneuver the bomb to the very bottom of Lucifer’s Rift than she could die alone in the crushing depths.  The slightest error or lapse in concentration and millions would die along with her, and Triton was clearly betting on this outcome.

“You may lower the bomb into the launch tube.”

The winch overhead activated with an electrical purr and the doomsday device was slowly lowered into the chilly water, complete with its sexy human navigator.  Aquagirl watched calmly as the water rose to claim her, reducing Halflife, Lord Triton and the rest of the mad cult to distorted shimmering figures beyond the churning surface of the waterline just overhead.  Then the iris above her ground slowly closed, leaving her alone at last in the cramped launch tube.   Her inhuman adversaries were gone -- all that was real now was the steel cage, the heavy manacles, and the nuclear bomb beneath her feet.

For a moment all was silence, and Aquagirl steeled herself for the deadly ordeal that was to come.  Then the bottom suddenly fell out of her world as the waterproof hatch beneath her slid open, ejecting both bomb and terrified heroine into the open ocean.  The heavy steel deathtrap plummeted like a rock, sliding from the ejection tube and quickly reaching terminal velocity of approximately 40 kilometers miles per hour.  At that speed maneuvering would be impossible, but without the four steering fans she had no means to check her descent.  The blue-eyed avenger was on a one way elevator to Lucifer’s Rift.  She could only hope that she would have enough time once the controls were activated to check her rate of descent before careening off the jagged rocky walls.

Then she saw the ocean floor, a flat plain of grayish-white, stark and foreboding in the gathering gloom of the open ocean.  But directly beneath her the white mud fields rose to narrow peaks, then gave way altogether to a scar of deepest black: Lucifer’s Rift.  A cold chill of mortal horror, made worse by the icy rush of the water, ran through her body as her grim destination rapidly grew larger.  Desperately Aquagirl struggled against her restraints, but to no avail. The terrible bomb and the young heroine were inexorably linked for their final icy plunge.

What was that!?  Even as Aquagirl looked down she saw a shadow move across the sea floor.  But no ship could cast such a huge shadow from the distant surface -- perhaps a submarine?  The blonde avenger strained but she could see nothing now but the growing wound of the rift, now yawning wide to accept the doomsday sled.  Apparently, her mind was just playing tricks on her, a common side-effect of paralyzing fear but one that she could not afford right at the moment.

CHAK!

At 1,000 meters the controls activated, and a series of floodlights mounted at various points on the bomb’s pipe framework burst into life.  Immediately Aquagirl could see the two faces of the rift flanking her to either side, still perhaps 50 meters distant.  Beneath her was only dark water, so this gave her a brief opportunity to concentrate only on slowing down the break-neck speed of her descent.  The rubber-clad adventuress ran all four jet so to full power and vectored them as close to straight down as she could manage.  Of course, the jets were by design not fully reversible and not nearly powerful enough to actually halt the sled, but the slower she was moving as she entered the narrower parts of the rift, the better her chances of making it to the bottom.  It was as simple as that.

“My god!” Aquagirl mouthed as a pinnacle of rock suddenly materialized out of nowhere directly beneath her.  A careful adjustment of the joystick pitched two of the control fans, sending the sled careening to one side and just barely missing the huge object.  But Aquagirl was in for an even greater shock.  It wasn’t a pinnacle of rock that she had just missed. It was Drako, the trained killer whale from the Oceanic Institute.

So stunned was Aquagirl at the unexpected appearance of the killer whale, that she very nearly steered the steel cage directly into one of the walls of the rift.  But at the last moment the blonde bombshell altered course, positioning herself back into the middle of the chasm even as her mind struggled with the implications of Drako’s sudden appearance.  Clearly, Dr Vargas had locked onto her homing beacon but had lost the signal before he could get a clean fix on her.  Realizing that there was no time to organize a search and rescue mission, he must have released Drako, hoping that their close bond would aid the whale in locating her position even without the beacon.  It was clearly the work of a desperate man, but at the moment she could have hardly imagined a more able rescuer.

“Click-click-click-click,” Aquagirl made a clicking noise deep in her throat, which approximated the voice of a porpoise or baby whale.  She had introduced the message to Drako years ago as a distress call.  They had done a lot of dangerous stunts together and the clacking noise indicated that he was to take his trainer immediately to the surface by whatever means necessary.  Now if he would just remember it…

CRUNCH!

Aquagirl’s world jolted anew as the huge whale swam up from the side and took the entire cage into his mouth.   Drako’s jaws closed around the cage, snapping off the control fans like butterfly wings and causing the entire structure to groan under the strain.  The young vigilante winced at the force of the impact, praying that Drako would not inadvertently set off the bomb.  But in the end there was nothing to do but roll the dice.  This was her only chance to get free from the steel cage and she meant to take full advantage of it.

“Click-click-click-click,” Aquagirl continued her distress call with mounting urgency.  Drako responded by completely checking their downward progress altogether and pulling them back towards the surface.

SCREEEK!  As Aquagirl had hoped, the cage was bending and twisting under the strain of Drako’s powerful jaws.  The lack of spars or cross bars in Halflife’s design made it vulnerable to lateral bending, and this was precisely the type of force it was being exposed to while laying horizontal in the mouth of a killer whale!  There was no way Aquagirl was going to break free of her manacles without a blowtorch, but if the bars to which they were attached were to come loose….

SPTANG!  From her vantage point almost completely within Drako’s cavernous mouth, she could see the bars giving way, and suddenly her left wrist and ankle were free.  She carefully slipped the “O” rings securing her manacles off the bar, then sent the bar hurling into the abyss beyond Drako’s maw.   The bar that held her right manacles soon followed, taking with them the tiny joy sticks Halflife had intended for her to use while piloting the bomb into the heart of Lucifer’s Rift.

Then her heart sank as the bomb itself broke away altogether and began to accelerate into the darkness.

Set free in the nick of time, Aquagirl slipped out of Drako’s mouth, and immediately dove for the bomb.  With the help of her caplox jets the 120-pound heroine easily overtook the tumbling bomb and grasped one of the bars in her gloved hand.  The masked heroine quickly slipped under the bomb and powered her jets to full force, hoping to check their rate of descent.  Immediately below, an outcropping of rock loomed, the object that was to be ground zero for the detonation that would destroy Oceanis.  But Aquagirl managed to slow down the sphere just enough – her boots touched down on the rough surface with punishing force, but she absorbed most of the impact with her body and managed to bring the bomb to a smooth halt.

Then Drako was beside her once more, curious to know where she had disappeared to in such a hurry, and that’s when Aquagirl saw the emergency pack that Vargas had secured to the whale’s back.  For a moment Aquagirl looked at the bomb, then back to the pack, and finally her mouth bent in a cruel grin.  Time to take out the trash.

First, Aquagirl placed a hand on Drako’s snout in the manner of an expert trainer to reassure him that she was all right. Then she made her way to the pack and deftly unzipped the main pouch, drawing out what appeared to a flat Mylar balloon with an attached aluminum gas canister and several long cords extending from its base.  The cords she secured to the pipes holding the bomb, then she opened the valve on the canister, slowly filling the Mylar balloon with gas.  The strings went taught as the balloon continued to inflate and as soon as the upward force was equal to the downward weight of the bomb, Aquagirl shut off the valve altogether.

It wasn’t necessary to know precisely where on the ocean’s surface Triton’s ship was.  That was one of the benefits of low-yield hydrogen weapons like the one that hovered before her.  It was enough to know that they were up there somewhere, bound by the principles of Newtonian mechanics to be no more than a few kilometers away, even at full speed as they attempted to distance themselves from the point where they anticipated that Aquagirl would detonate the bomb.  And it was enough to know that Halflife had added a “safety” device such that the bomb, once activated, could not be returned to the ocean surface without setting it off.  Most of the force of the detonation would be directed harmlessly upward into the familiar mushroom cloud seen in nuclear propaganda films, but the resulting firestorm would certainly extend for miles around ground zero and generate surface waves powerful enough to swamp any surface vessels that happened to be in the area.  Of course, the detonation would also be an ecological disaster for years to come, but at the moment, Aquagirl didn’t give a damn.

Clinging to one of the Drako’s surfboard-sized flippers, the young dynamo positioned the bomb and its Mylar buoyancy device for its long regal ascent to the surface.  Then she gave the balloon a final shot of air from the gas bottle, causing the makeshift contraption to slowly rise toward the surface.   Aquagirl waved as the bomb began its reverse journey: in about 15 minutes both Lord Triton and Halflife would be in for one hell of a surprise.

For a moment both whale and heroine hung suspended in the blue nothingness, watching as the doomsday machine dwindled in the distance, slowly ascending like a boomerang on its wielder.  But Aquagirl couldn’t stick around long – even a shallow detonation would generate underwater shockwaves that would be lethal for miles.  So after giving the surface a final gorgeous smile, she slipped up on the back of Drako and clicked into his ear.  With a surge of his powerful tail, the killer whale descended quickly into the depths, carrying both himself and his mistress back toward the distant city of Oceanis.

FINIS.