The Dark Edge Chronicles - Clan War

Splashdown

It was a frenetic few minutes spent getting the liliths cut down, the tubes to their suits secured, then carefully moved to the sea entrance. Then Tanner and her team were gearing back up to make sure a path was still clear past the sub parking lot.

A few tense moments then Tanner was reappearing to flash a thumbs up.

"Nighthawk Two, Viper One," Lash said as Truk and Ballan began to carefully lower the liliths into the water and the waiting hands of Tanner's marines.

"Viper One, Nighthawk Two," Fiadh answered. "Go."

"Bring the gunship to where the marines were dropped and have it drop its cargo net into the water through the belly door," Lash spoke quickly. "Have Ellie and Meredith standing by with medical gear. We're putting the liliths into the net and winching them aboard that way. And have Dru cover the net. We've got merpeople in the water and they may attempt to retake the liliths before they're secure. Do you copy?"

"I copy, Lash," Fiadh said confidently. "Dru is setting up the cargo net now and Ellie and Meredith are prepping the beds. Standby for the net in the water in thirty seconds!"

"Copy thirty seconds. Tanner's team is on the move!"

With a handful of the marines forming a cordon to keep an eye out for merpeople attacks in the dark water, Tanner and a couple of her team pulled the liliths in a rope chain out of the entryway and towards the spot they had been dropped off at. Just as they were about ten meters from the spot, the water abruptly lit up from spotlights shining down from the Nighthawk hovering smoothly above. Then the heavy, woven-nylon cargo net was dropping onto the surface.

Reaching it with a couple of hard kicks, Tanner pulled it down and began to quickly and carefully load the liliths into it

"Second rope chain is in the water, Tanner," Lash indicated over comms. "We're following it in. Recon One, Strike One and Two are exfiling now!"

"Copy, Viper One," she replied into her diving helmet's built-in comms. "Last lilith in chain one is now in the net." She looked up at the dark mass of the hovering Nighthawk with its rectangle of light marking its belly door.

"Dru. Net is loaded. Commence the winch in!"

Dru's voice came over the comms.

"Copy loaded net," the Nosferatu queen replied. "Winching in now!" And the heavy cargo net, now filled with the unmoving forms of fourteen liliths, lifted out of the water.

As she watched the net begin its ten meter journey into the hovering gunship, Tanner caught flashes of light beneath the surface out of the corner of her eye. Immediately dropping below the surface, she looked in that direction. And watched several of her legionnaires firing their Stingers at dimly-seen figures moving towards them from deeper water.

One round, punched out fast enough to be undodgeable even under water, darted through the intervening distance to hammer into a merman, the water breather illuminated by the dancing net of discharging electricity that cocooned him on impact. And he was revealed as a humanoid the size and dimensions of an average human male with visible gill slits in the neck and webbing between the fingers and around the feet to help them move quickly through their preferred medium. These were further assisted in their watery travels by close-fitting wetsuits, engineered to keep them warm in almost any temperature of water, their hair left deliberately long as a visual means of identifying individuals.

Then the cocoon of artificial lightning was gone and the dark shape that was the merman began to slowly sink out of sight towards the sea floor. And he wasn't the only one: striking from multiple vectors, the cordon was under siege by a determined force that easily outnumbered them.