Leanna O’Regan hit the ocean surface hard, head first, creating a splash against the large rolling wake from the massive dark grey ship she had fallen from. The impact forced her arms away from around her head, and she continued downwards into the cold, dark depths. She closed her eyes as she fell downwards into the water, and let her body relax against the rushing water as she slowed down in her descent. She started kicking her legs as she slowed, working with her natural buoyancy to swim upwards towards the surface again. Within a few moments, her head broke through the surface and she gasped for air as she opened her eyes. All she could see was the open ocean ahead of her, the rolling waves and the bright blue sky above her. She began treading water, bobbing up and down in the roiling water created by the battle station behind her. She turned around to look at it, and saw it’s tall hull move quickly away from her. As it sailed steadily away, she could see the decks and bridges stacked about it, and the various cannons and guns bristling form its top and sides. It had a peculiar shape for a ship, like a four-pointed star with two of the points on each side lifted out of the water.

Leanna watched the battle station continue on its course away from her, and the water around her started to clear. She could see her arms and legs below the surface, and shuddered at the featureless column of water below her. She saw that one of the arms of her yellow hoodie had been torn off, and that the hood had slipped from over her head and unzipped itself while she was underwater. She slipped her other arm out of the hoodie, and wiggled out of it, letting it sink below her. She watched it for a few seconds as it drifted downwards, and soon disappear. 

She looked back at the receding ship, and noticed something orange move along one of the lower decks, and then fall over the railing into the ocean. As she bobbed up and down in the waves, her view was obscured and so she couldn’t see what it was exactly. Between waves, she could see that the orange object disappear and then re-appear, much larger than before. Squinting at it in the midday sun, she could also see that it was not only bigger, but cone-shaped. 

“A life raft!” she exclaimed, starting to shiver. She stopped treading water and started to swim towards it, stopping occaisonally to see where it was. As she got closer, she could see that it indeed was a round inflatable life raft, with a fabric roof and clear plastic windows. She swam up to the orange, cone-shaped life raft, and grabbed one of the nylon ropes hanging around its perimeter. Hanging onto the rope, she pulled herself around the life raft to find the opening to get in. Finding the opening, she pulled herself around to get in, but then let go and pushed herself away back into the ocean. A wet hand was reaching out to her from a light-grey sleeve, from inside the life raft.

“Come on! Grab my hand!” the communications officer from the bridge said, leaning out over the edge of the life raft. His light-grey uniform was soaked, and his cap was gone, revealing closely-cropped blonde hair, longer on top and pulled forward, clinging to his forehead.

Leanna swam away from the life raft, screaming an expletive at the young, pale man. “I’ll take my chances with the sharks and jelly-fish, you jerk!”

“Leanna, please! Let me explain… take my hand!” the young man pleaded, leaning further out of the raft towards Leanna. “I need to know where Rosa and Theo are, and that they’re safe. C’mon, this is bigger than you or me, and you know it!”

Leanna scowled at the young man, shouting another expletive at him and swam away from him and the life raft. By now, the battleship was far in the distance, with no sign of changing direction. The last of the waves from the ship’s wake had passed them, to be replaced by only the regular choppy ocean waves.

“Leanna!” the young man shouted angrily after her, “I need to know that my wife and child are safe! You need to know that no less than the President wants them captured!”

“Your ex-wife, Lucky!” Leanna shouted back at him.

“Who I still love! I don’t think you know how much is at stake here!” Lucky said, slicking back the blonde wet hair over his forehead back over his head. “Look, Dante Valderez will find her soon enough. Help me warn her and the California Independence Movement of General Thompson’s plans!”

Leanna stopped swimming away, and turned to look back at Lucky, her face clearly skeptical of what he had just said. She started moving back towards the life raft, and got close enough for Lucky to grab her hands. He pulled her into the covered raft, and the two of them sat opposite each other, with their backs to the fabric walls. Leanna was breathing heavily from the exertion of all the swimming and treading water. Catching her breath, she pulled back her wet, long black hair over the top of her head and down the back. She glared at Lucky angrily, pulling up her legs and folding her arms over them. Lucky sat with his legs straight out and arms open, looking at Leanna in her white t-shirt and shorts, out of the corner of his eye. He reached into one of the rafts side pockets, and pulled out a yellow plastic device, with a strobe light and extendible antenna on it.

“What’s that?” Leanna demanded. She leapt over to Lucky and pulled it out of his hands before he could respond. “Is this some kind of radio or homing device?”

“Yeah, it’s an emergency beacon. If we turn it on, we’ll get help- wait, don’t!” Lucky tried to say, as Leanna threw it out of the raft’s entrance. He leaned over to try and grab it before it hit the water, but missed and watched it disappear in the waves and sink down to the ocean floor away from them. “What the hell did you do that for? They won’t be able to find us now! It will take them hours to even notice that I’m missing!”

“Good,” Leanna said calmly, leaning back against the fabric wall of the raft. “You now have all the time in the world to tell me all about that battleship we were on, why you were on it, and how you became a traitor to the CIM cause, Lucretius Angelus-Jardine!”

*** This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. ***