The War Beneath
The submarine’s flickering controls hissed softly, droning warnings in ancient Cyrillic that no one could decipher anymore. This craft had not been meant for such desperate tasks. Once a mighty weapon of the Mediterranean campaigns, the Obsidian Fleet was now nothing but a shadow, its once-glistening empire sunken to the ocean bed.
Keziah’s second-in-command, a lean woman with a gaunt face and piercing green eyes named Adria, approached her. Adria’s patched verdant uniform—a mismatched collection retrieved over decades of ambushes—tightened as she crossed her wiry arms.
"You’re gambling with ghosts," Adria said in Belaidian, the tongue of the displaced. Her voice was neither accusatory nor cowardly, but colder than the brine pressing all around them. "Benghazi isn’t what it used to be, Commander. If they dismantled Tartus, they’ll do worse there."
Keziah didn’t look up from the console. The hollows around her eyes told the unspoken truth: she knew. But knowing wasn’t how empires were salvaged.
"Every port burns differently," Keziah whispered. The dark poetry of it was bitter on her tongue. "Libya was once Al-Khaleefa’s corridor. Its harbors were unbreakable. If there’s sanctuary left in this cursed basin, we’ll find it there. If not..." She gave a brittle smirk. "Sailors die wet."
Adria opened her mouth, paused, then shut it. She set her jaw and turned away.
Shards of Old Empires
Three centuries earlier, the Mediterranean had been a tapestry of conquest and rebellion. Great alliances rose and fell across its restless waters: Atlantean speculation fused with Venetian foresight, mingling with forgotten Harappan strategies and severing Carthaginian faiths. In places like Syria and Libya, tides of power left ruins that often sank beneath the sands.
The tale of Keziah’s world was one of collapse. The vertical cities spanning islands like balconies in an endless sea—gone. Insular kingdoms of glass melted to ash under white-hot satellites. The seaways, once jubilant with bright sails of commerce, had become murderers’ veins, veins whose memories of thriving now poisoned every soldier’s heart. Benghazi, once the jewel of endless harbors, now glittered not with lights but by the black-glass shards of its broken skyline.
Keziah carried shards of her own – one beneath her ribs, another in her voice. Her father had burned with Tartus when the Syrian flotilla fell. Her mother had drowned when Corsican raiders cracked the hull of her research vessel. Keziah herself had come of age reading water charts and navy-orange diagrams of decommissioned warships in candlelight. Strength under siege had been her birthright.
The sonar shrieked again. A nearby war machine, an enemy skiff, arced across their radar like a shark’s relentless fin.
The Chase to Benghazi
"They’re still tracking us," Adria hissed. "It’s the same frigate that swept in from the Gulf of Sidra."
Keziah chewed her lip and didn’t answer. Her fingers roamed instinctively over the brass lever of the cloak generator – a technology her fleet scarcely understood. It was Siberian tech, ancient and merciless. Without it, the Obsidian Fleet would’ve been torn apart years ago. But it demanded precious reserves of energy they could hardly afford.
"Engage it," said Adria, almost begging. "We need stealth."
"No," Keziah snapped, her voice almost cracking under its own pressure. "Not yet."
Her eyes drifted again to the faint glimmer of a map etched into the screen. Benghazi was close—less than two nautical miles—but intangible dangers loomed there. Local factions that once aided the Obsidian mariners had grown bitter. Pirates haunted the outskirts. And then there was the storm—a wall of towering cumulonimbus clouds roiling over the ocean like heaven’s wrath.
But Benghazi was home, and Keziah believed in the marrow of her bones that no doom could outweigh the power of claiming soil her ancestors had touched long ago.
Harbinger Tides
As the submarine surged forward, Keziah’s mind drifted to an old story—one of Odysseus, told once by a Ferranese poet as they passed her bottle of salt-sick rum beside a dying lighthouse. The Greeks didn’t know it, but the sirens they immortalized in stone and prose hailed from the seas near Libya’s jagged shores. They were the harbingers of fate, drawing sailors toward death or triumph.
Keziah smiled faintly. "Adria," she called without looking, "Ready the crew. If there’s a song to be sung, we’ll silence it or make it ours."
The submarine breached the final veil between distant desperation and whatever lay ahead: the war-torn wharf, the shadow-slick docks, the riddled promises of Benghazi. Plunging into the unknown was no stranger to sailors like Keziah. Even hope could be wet when born underwater.
Genre: Dystopian Maritime Adventure
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: The Russian Navy Departs Syria for Strategic Benghazi
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