Ocean: War of Independence Read Free

that wanted to capture any or all of them. So far, Alicia was unaware of any captures or additional deaths among her companions, and she could only hope that the momentum had shifted in favor of the Sea Warriors and their allies, and that peace would reign. Public opinion was holding steady, after slipping a little in the aftermath of the Chi’ang- and Talbot-led massacre. In the public arena, it helped that those fugitives had been turned over for justice, but it had not resulted in any reduction in government efforts to arrest and shut down the Sea Warriors.
    Remaining hyper alert, Alicia had found another tiny uninhabited islet not far from the one they used for their headquarters, and she was practicing a vee-wave there, focusing power on the point of the “vee” as it struck a cliff on the island. She found that she was able to increase the intensity, and saw rocks crumble away at the base when she struck them with the power of water.
    As she practiced with these waves, she wished she was a fly on the Golden Gate Bridge, able to see what would happen there in a matter of hours. Closing off the channel would be a monumental achievement, but it would give the Sea Warriors two fronts in an escalating war. She hoped the rest of the conflict could be waged politically instead, because if reasonable minds prevailed, the cause of the ocean was sure to advance significantly.
    She reconsidered, after catching herself in a moment of weakness. The cause needed to prevail . She didn’t want incremental improvements in how humans treated the ocean. Conditions were too drastic for that, with coral reefs dying, the waters used as a garbage dump, and marine species that had been on the planet for millions of years in danger of vanishing forever.
    Unfortunately, for the Sea Warriors to prevail, the changes were not likely to occur peacefully. Human beings needed to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the water, forced to stop abusing it in the thousands of ways that they had been doing for so long, for too long. Their bad behavior had gone on for eons, so in the near term, until people learned how to behave, the measures against them would have to be draconian. Alicia envisioned an ideal situation in which a Declaration of Ocean Independence was put into effect, removing the world’s interconnected ocean from human access, and not permitting selfish, careless people to exploit it any longer. No exceptions, no loopholes, no ways for slimy, tricky lawyers to allow anyone to usurp the resources of the ocean.
    She reconsidered. There might be legitimate human uses for some ocean resources, such as formulating drugs from marine organisms to treat AIDS, breast cancer, and other diseases. The blood of horseshoe crabs, she’d heard, could be used to heal infections caused by bacteria. And squalene, obtained from the livers of certain sharks, could relieve the suffering of burn victims. Similar discoveries had been made about the healing and treatment properties of a number of coral-reef life forms. She saw nothing wrong with relieving human pain and suffering, but any treatments developed from ocean organisms needed to be closely controlled by the Sea Warriors, the water-adapted hybrids who had the welfare of the ocean foremost in their minds. And it would have to be done with complete transparency.
    She would bring up the idea of a declaration to Kimo later today, and hoped he liked it. But first, she needed to practice with her waves.
    Now Alicia focused on generating one of her mini-tidal waves, drawing the sides in on one as she had done before, creating a wave between herself and the cliff. She estimated that this one was at least two feet higher than her last attempt, which pleased her very much. Yes, it was around seven or eight feet high, and twenty or twenty-five feet wide.
    She envisioned it in motion, and the wall of water rushed toward the cliff, increasing in velocity until it slammed hard against the base. Rocks and dirt