Silence

For days I drifted in and out of consciousness and during my few waking moments I could only make out the eerie blue glow of an operating theatre within Walter Smith's secret underwater lair and the occasional half hearted moan from the Traynor who I sensed was tied to a table beside me then I'd drift into unconsciousness again and there would only be silence.

Silence, it was well named because during those faint times I was awake, fuzzy as they are now in my memory, I couldn't make out any sound (save for the Traynor) but a constant white noise. Blue glow, white noise - all I needed next was something red to come along and it'd confirm that I was in some hellish Rangers den. It didn't take long. My final dozing moments in Silence were interrupted by unseen hands wrapping me in bandages and wheeling me, still strapped to a bed, along corridors with red warning lights flashing in silence (no sirens in here, oh no) until we came to an air lock where our mysterious guards handed us over to what looked strangely like a Sikh navy! These men with their great whiskers and turbans were dressed in navy whites and took us through the air lock into a monster of a submarine, shaped like a denizen of the deepest ocean, iron tentacles clinging onto the sea bed, spotlights shining through the reinforced glass and illuminating the approaching figure of Walter Smith.

He pressed something into my hand, turned and was gone as the air lock closed and we disappeared into the bowels of what I would later learn was the Nautilus.