Issue #26: “Adrift, Part One”

The ocean is a vast realm that may bring life as well as death.

The key to surviving such an unpredictable world as the ocean floor is in knowing where to tread, and where not to. If you ever find yourself at the mercy of the tides, there is not much you can do, except to hope that you may somehow make it out alive.

But even if you do survive Poseidon’s wrath…

…you may wind up lost at sea.



He was known far and wide as the ruler of the waters of the Earth but now, drifting senselessly, tugged across the cold depths of the ocean, his clothes tattered and his thoughts blank, he was far from the king he once was.

The war to end all wars had stripped that title from him.

A war that came down to a struggle between two brothers.

A war that had thrown the oceans into chaos.

He was not sure where he was, not even certain he was breathing, but there was one thing that the King of the Seven Seas knew.

He would not die this way.

Though he was now a king without a kingdom, he was still a man with his world.



They had gathered.

A large round table rested at the epicenter of the darkened room. The room would have been pitch black, if not for the single light, dimly illuminating the table below. Scattered around the table were a dozen figures, each hidden in the shadows of their surroundings where they sat.

“It appears fate has given us a golden opportunity, gentlemen. I suggest we do not pass it up,” said a man’s voice from the darkened shape sitting in front of a group of files that were labeled ARTHUR CURRY/ORIN/AQUAMAN. “Poseidonis is in ruins and its king missing. They are leaderless, divided.”

“Indeed, sir. They haven’t been this vulnerable for quite a while. I’d been hoping for this chance for a long time. And thanks again for allowing me to take part in this,” said another; the only thing visible was a gleaming prosthetic hand resting on the table’s surface.

A deep, hoarse groan came from the figure seated beside him. His silhouette was tall and his shoulders broad. Wide circular green eyes glowed from where the darkness hid his face. The man with the files in front of him leaned forward a bit, his arms leaning on the table.

“Something the matter? Do you see a flaw in this that I do not?” hissed the first man, twiddling his fingers.

“No, sir. I am just confused, is all,” said a deep, booming voice, echoing from the bulky green-eyed man. “You promised me Aquaman’s head. But if he is nowhere to be found…How am I supposed to feel his bones crush in my hands?”

“Do not worry, my friend. Aquaman will be found. And it will be he who unlocks the secrets we’ve been searching for. He will give us the means to show the world the truth that has slipped from their sight.”

The men all turned to the first, who neatened the stack of files on Aquaman.

“He will be plucked from the tides and, like any other fish, he is only meant to be caught and used by the people of the surface.”



Thirty-Seven Hours Later

“Hello again, Aquaman.”

Orin began to feel warmth tingling on his cheeks and a light glimmering in his hazy eyes. He felt sore and his throat had never felt this dry before. It was as if he had had all of the water in his body drained out of him like a sponge.

“Who are you?” Aquaman asked hoarsely. “Where am I?”

“You’re where you belong. In custody.”

“In custody? And you are?”

“A mere extension of a much larger arm.”

The man was clad in a long white robe, a latex cap was over his head, and he was wearing small circular spectacles.

Orin looked down at his own body uneasily, not certain of what he would find. He was shirtless, with long scars running down his torso. His emerald pants were ripped up pretty good but still mostly intact.

The stranger seemed to notice where he was looking, his gaze shifting to Aquaman’s chest from behind his glasses.

“You had quite a bit of shrapnel in you, fishman. Luckily, I was able to extract it from you in time.”

“Guess I should thank you.” Aquaman tried lifting his arms but when he looked down to see what was stopping him, he found that all of his limbs were held down by restraints to the medical slab he was on. “But considering my current position…maybe not.”

“Oh, don’t be so hasty. By all accounts, you should be dead. Your kingdom, that aquatic city of yours, Poseidonis…is destroyed.”

Orin’s hazy eyes grew large and he began to cough, feeling that heat boiling in his throat. The man on the other hand, started to laugh.

“Sorry if you feel a bit lightheaded. We’ve learned the secrets of how to keep you Atlanteans contained.” The man snickered. “You’re just like any other fish, get you out of water for too long and you become as helpless as an insect.”

The man stepped up to the table Aquaman was attached to, his face alight with hatred, not an ounce of pity anywhere.

“Me though…I created a much simpler way of taking you out of water.” His eyes looked up at an object that was hanging from the ceiling over Aquaman. “That machine there, it’s been drying you out, causing all of the water both on and inside you to dissipate.”

Aquaman looked over his body. He was pale and his skin was dried out and dying all over his chest and face.

“Clever,” Orin said, weakly.

“My employers thought so too.”

“Are they the ‘we’ you mentioned? Are you just a pawn in all of this?”

“Far from it.”

“Really? Then maybe you can enlighten my on why such an important man like yourself has been given the task to be prison guard to just one man?” Aquaman said, his teeth grinding beneath his golden beard.

Without a word, the man threw his hand out and smacked Orin across the face, the pain stinging much greater than it usually would thanks to the loss of water in his system.

“Look at you, almighty king. So high on your pedestal that you degrade others without even knowing or understanding exactly who you are up against.”

“Then why don’t you tell me so I can make a better judgment on just how essential to your employers you are?”

For a brief moment the man did not break eye contact, before turning around with his arms behind his back and taking a few small paces away from the captive Aquaman. He peeled off his latex gloves and threw them onto a small table before shifting his body to face Orin.

“Tell me, Aquaman, have you ever heard of O.G.R.E.?”



“Anything?”

“Nothing.”

“This is becoming much more difficult than I’d expected it would be.”

“Yeah. A real pain in my ass.”

“Look, there’s been no trace of any of his remains in that rubble so far. Which means he’s probably floating around here somewhere.”

“We don’t really have much to go on though. We’ve only been able to eavesdrop on those Atlanteans’ conversations. All we’re going on is some of their beliefs that their king is still alive and, honestly, I think they’re in denial.”

“Stop being so negative.”

“I don’t get it, though…why are we so intent on finding this guy again? Last I checked, we weren’t exactly on his buddy list.”

“Because of what we did. We’ve never been able to repent for that. And honestly, Biff, I believe this is it. Our chance for redemption.”

“Whatever you say, Dane.”



Orin raised a brow, a bit puzzled.

“O.G.R.E.? No. Should I have?”

“Ha. O.G.R.E. was a worldwide terrorist organization a little while back. It spanned the entire Earth, with operatives in just about every town of every country. It even spread so far as hotshot aristocrats like Lex Luthor; even to Cornelius Krell, a man I believe you’ve met.”

“Krell?” Aquaman said in shock.

“Calm yourself. Krell left the moment the organization changed its purpose. But that’s not even the half of it. Yes, Luthor, Krell, and others like them were involved in O.G.R.E. but the one thing that will really surprise you is that it even involved your brother.”

“Orm? Impossible. I would have known if he was a part of it. And why would he ever ally himself with surface dwellers?”

“I wouldn’t call it allying himself with us. He manipulated us!” the man said, his face reddening. “While he was planning his coup on Poseidonis and your throne, he was also posing as the leader of O.G.R.E., calling himself The Supreme One.”

Orin couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“We were unaware at the time of him being your brother, but we learned it the hard way when he used our resources to restore the powers of some people called something like the Dark Prophets,” the man explained, still clearly infuriated. “Once he had done that, he had no more use for us and O.G.R.E. was disbanded.”

“So that’s the story? You were upset that my brother used you and now you’re taking it out on me?” Orin said, hoarsely coughing.

“Not even close. O.G.R.E. has been reorganized. With a new leader and a new direction.”

The mystery was beginning to wane on Aquaman.

“I’m not impressed by the drama. Get to the point.”

“We’ve severed our terrorist connections. We’re not out to destroy the world, but we’ve devoted ourselves to protecting it and its oceans thanks to our leader’s own views. And our main priority is stopping the Atlantean threat.”

“Atlantean threat!?” Orin, himself, was beginning to grow agitated.

“Oh please, don’t act so outraged. Think about it. In these last few years alone, ever since the dawn of this age of ‘superheroes’, the world has been plagued with threats from every direction. Alien invasions even. But we see just how big a threat Atlantis in itself is. An entire people whose history has taught them to hate and fear the surface. Now tell me, where does hatred and fear always lead to?”

“As long as I’m king, this threat you’re talking about is nonexistent!”

“King of what exactly?”

Aquaman paused, his mouth still ajar. He hadn’t even had time to think about this…Now that Poseidonis was gone, what was he the king of?

“The war you just fought and the destruction of that undersea dome has thrown the whole ocean into madness. And the ocean takes up three quarters of the entire world. So you can see why we’re a bit concerned that it seems the seas are falling apart.”

“And keeping me here isn’t going to help the matter! You’ll just be fueling the debate!”

“We finally have a live specimen to test. You’ll be the key to our victory over the Atlanteans. So you see, Aquaman, you are saving the world’s oceans.”

A frown crossed Orin’s face and, despite the man’s claims at him saving the world…

…it really didn’t feel that way.



“And a giant chunk of metal should interest us, why?”

“There’s debris from the city even this far out into the open ocean.”

“Yeah, must have been one hell of a fight.”

“And if pieces of Poseidonis could get out this far…so could our man.”

“You really think so?”

“Nope. I know so.”

Two divers, wearing high-tech helmets and wetsuits hovered at the ocean floor, lights blaring from their helmets while they walked across the muddy and seaweed-filled terrain. One of them swam a short distance from where they had been walking to a strange-colored object that merged with the brown and green ground.

The diver picked up the small object which slowly swayed in the currents like cloth. But to his touch, it didn’t feel much like cloth. It was rather scaly, rough, and…orange.

“Biff, let’s head back to the ship. We’ve got ourselves a lead.”



“You don’t look so good.”

“Just give me a drop of water, and then we’ll see how good you look,” Aquaman said.

He continued to try and make his way out of his restraints but his body was just too weak to perform the task. He licked his cracked lips but, even then, felt just as dry as before.

“No need for such violence.”

The man pulled out a medical knife from one of his pockets and, for a brief second, Orin saw his own reflection in the sharp blade.

“Correction. No need for such violence unless it’s in the name of science.”

He drove the blade into Aquaman’s gut and the king let out a yelp but quickly found that there was no need for one. The blade had shattered on impact with his skin.

“Incredible. As strong as a rhino, you are. But it appears you could be stabbed, couldn’t you?” The man ran his gloved fingers over Aquaman’s chest where a good-sized scar was present. It was the scar from when he had been impaled by his doppelganger Thanatos’s sword. “But with your kind of strength it must take a great force to be able to stab you. Pity.”

The man tossed the shattered knife to the floor before he started connecting wires to Aquaman’s rib area and then some to his forehead, without another word, while the King of the Seas kept on struggling to break free.

“Living in the pressure of the ocean depths has made you remarkably strong, my friend,” the man said, adding an extra emphasis on the ‘friend’. “Not Superman strong of course, but you definitely can hold your own it seems.”

Orin was shaking wildly in his restraints, his veins pulsing in his head, continuing to try and get out but still to no avail. The O.G.R.E. operative made sure that all of the wires connecting to Aquaman’s bare skin were secured before walking over to a control panel nearby.

“I wonder how much voltage an Atlantean like yourself can take…Looks like we’ll be finding out together, won’t we?”

Aquaman let out a roar before the restraint over his right wrist snapped off and he reached to tear off the other, sweat pouring down his face.

“I don’t think so,” the man snickered.

He turned the circular dial on the control panel. Almost instantly, Aquaman gave a cry of pain while hundreds of volts of electricity shot through his body; his attempt at making it to freedom failed, his arm withdrawing while he felt the electrical charge course through his very being.

The villain watched with satisfaction while Orin roared in agony, his body trembling uncontrollably.

“Now!”

Four figures leapt from the shadows of the lab where crackles of electricity could be seen from Aquaman. The O.G.R.E. operative looked around in horror while the four silhouettes broke off into two groups of two; two going toward Aquaman while the other two were converging on him.

“What is this!?” the man hissed, reaching for the desk nearby where a silenced pistol rested.

He managed to grasp his fingers around the weapon before one of the silhouettes raised his arm at him and fired a dart from some sort of wrist device. The dart flew through the air and made impact with the O.G.R.E. member’s left shoulder, knocking him over the desk and onto the floor.

“Nice shot, Dane!” said a woman’s voice from the pair approaching Aquaman.

“Thanks, hon!” the one who had fired the dart called back.

The largest of the four, a broad-shouldered man with large arms rushed the control panel. He pulled out an extendable harpoon from his back and jammed it into the controls. Immediately, Aquaman, his eyes rolled up so only the whites could be seen, stopped screaming and squirming.

“Don’t worry, Aquaman. We’re friends,” the woman said.

Orin let out a groan, opening his eyes enough to see that his rescuers were all wearing almost identical red wetsuits and helmets that covered their entire head, though, through the glass on the front, their faces could be seen. The woman released him from his restraints and he dropped from the slab onto his knees.

“Thanks…I…I just need to get to water.”

“So it’s true what they say then, Dane? Aquaman’s absolutely useless without water?” one of the men across the room whispered to his partner while they walked around the desk to see what had happened to the O.G.R.E. operative.

“Hush up, Nicky.”

“It’s Nick. Only Nick. I’m not a kid.”

“You’re still the youngest. And a real adult would have known better than to make such a rude remark about a hero like Aquaman,” Dane said.

“Pff,” Nick brushed off the insult.

The man who had been torturing Aquaman was in a heap on the ground, the pistol only meters from his hand.

“Biff! Judy! Get Aquaman out of here! We’ll be right behind you in a sec!” Dane called to the large man and the woman who were helping Orin up across the room.

“You heard your boytoy, Judy. We finally found Nemo so let’s get back to the ship,” Biff said, wrapping one of Aquaman’s arms over him and helping him move out of the lab.

“Nemo?” Aquaman asked, suddenly looking at his tall rescuer with annoyance and confusion.

“Come on, man, you’re the king of the seas and you haven’t seen Finding Nemo? Sounds like your type of movie if you ask me.” Biff chuckled while Judy followed close behind him.

“Who are you?” Orin questioned weakly.

“Ya mean you don’t remember us?” Biff snickered. “Back in the toxic spill…” he said before his voice cracked a little, his face growing grimmer.

Orin thought about it for a moment before nodding slowly while being lugged through the dark corridor with Biff.

“The toxic spill. You were the mercenaries Lex Luthor hired.”

“That’s us. The Sea Devils.”

Aquaman’s nearly lifeless arm tightened a bit around Biff’s shoulder. Why would the people who had killed so many Atlanteans be helping him? What reason could they have? Biff looked down at him and clearly could make out what he was thinking.

“We’ll explain later, pal. Our priority right now is getting you outta here,” Biff said.



“We’re approaching Base 347. We’ll be docking in minutes, sir.”

In the dark quarters of a ship, sat a man. He looked up to see the messenger and, after contemplating his message, a smile formed across his lips. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully…with a prosthetic right arm.

“Good. I may have only been recruited to this little organization of ours recently but even I think it’s well past time we have a face to face with the fishman. After all, where was he when this happened to me?” He stared harshly at his plastic hand. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

Behind him, two circular green eyes glowed and a deep breathing could be heard from the shadows. In a tone just as cold and deep, a voice spoke back:

“It’s going to be fun.”



“Nick, watch his gun!” Dane called.

The O.G.R.E. agent lunged for his weapon but Nick was a few steps ahead of him, kicking the gun across the floor, sending it sliding far out of the agent’s reach. The villain grabbed onto Nick’s ankle in fury and dragged him onto the ground. Nick’s reaction was much faster though and the youth’s foot kicked against the man’s face, breaking his nose after a few strikes.

“Damn you! Aquaman will not escape from here no matter how much you fight me!” the villain hissed.

“Oh yeah?” Dane pulled the man up by the collar and threw him onto his desk. “We’ll make sure he does.”

“You’ll make sure? Hahaha. You morons. Today was the day my progress was going to be examined. Some of my superiors are already on their way! Hahahahaha!” the man cackled.

Dane’s cheeks whitened and he glanced over to Nick who looked just as worried. Dane dropped the cruel man onto the desk and then turned toward the exit.

“Nick, let’s move! Judy and Biff are probably going to be needing some backup!”

“That’s it, hurry, you buffoons. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be killed either way. No one can escape O.G.R.E. Haha. No one.”



Arthur felt his injured body flailing back and forth against Biff while his rescuers carried him through the darkening corridors. He looked up ahead and saw a sight that he had believed he wouldn’t be seeing. An exit.

“Ya feeling okay, Aquaman?” Biff asked.

“I’ve been better. I’ll just be glad to be out of here.”

“Ha. Well no more worries, buddy. Looks like you’re about to be.”

Judy pushed down the handle of the metallic door and shoved it open, a beam of sunlight blazing in Aquaman’s eyes. He squinted into the light, staring at the outside world and heard the familiar sound of waves crashing against the rocks. He was staring at a large island in front of him, filled with palm trees and sand, with water on the horizon.

But that’s not all that was in the distance.

Four large ships were approaching the beach.

“You know what I said about you finally being able to get out of here?” Biff asked, his usually confident and friendly voice quivering. “I lied.”



“We’ll be docking momentarily!”

Standing proudly at the front of the ship’s deck was Peter Mortimer. He was clad in his Scavenger diving suit, sans the helmet; a trench coat was draped over his suit and swayed in the sea’s breeze while the ship moved closer to its destination. He rubbed his left hand against his prosthetic one with anxiousness.

This was his chance. He was finally going to prove his worth.

“Are we there?” said the booming voice from behind.

Mortimer didn’t even turn around.

“Yes, King Kraken. We’re finally going to meet him.”

Kraken crept out of the shadows of the ship’s interior, emerging into the outside world. He was tall, nearly eight feet in height, and his body was bulky. He was dressed entirely in a thick wetsuit with an old-looking diver’s helmet placed over his head. The green eyes of the helmet gleamed in the sunlight.

“Once we get what we want…I will place his head on my mantle,” he said.

Mortimer chuckled.

“Yes, sir. Once we get the information the leader wanted, you can have your fun. And Aquaman will die."

To Be Continued


If you wish to comment on this issue, please CLICK HERE to visit the letters page.