World of Water

by James Lovegrove

  “If a single envoy is all we’ve offered, is it any surprise they’re getting militant now?”

  “No, but we can all pretend it is.” Sigursdottir twisted her mouth in a cynical grimace. “This has been a while coming, but it was always inevitable. People had begun taking the Tritonians for granted, thinking they’d just go on passively accepting our presence.”

  “No one reckoned that if humans kept pushing them, sooner or later they’d push back.”

  “Quite. So along comes a whaler like this, and it’s just too much of a provocation, far as the Tritonians are concerned. Too intrusive to ignore. Big old ship pulling the planet’s largest mammals out of the sea and turning them into steaks – how can they let it be?”

  “No excuse for getting quite so radical,” said Milgrom, tapping the corpse nearest to her with the barrel of her rifle. “At what point does legitimate grievance become a sanction for mass murder? There’s a line, surely.”

  “Anyone mind if we carry on the conversation somewhere else?” said Francis. “I don’t know about you people but this place, these bodies, it’s giving me the willies.”

  Blunt sniggered. “Never heard you complain about being given the willies before.”

  “Skank.”

  “Whore.”

  “Bitch.”

  “Slut.”

  “Stow it, ladies,” barked Sigursdottir. “We all know you love each other like sisters. But Francis is right. There’s nothing we can do for these poor bastards, and frankly I’d rather not have them hovering over me like the world’s ugliest piñatas. Let’s bail and regroup topside. Get some fresh air.”

  16

  THE AIR OUTSIDE might have been fresher, and indeed warmer, but it didn’t do much to dispel the chilling memory of the massacre in the storage hold. The Egersund was a floating tomb, and Dev felt no great urge to remain aboard any longer than he had to.

  Sigursdottir insisted that they perform a search of the ship’s forward deck section, the only part they hadn’t checked yet. There was the accommodation level underneath the bridge, and a forecastle beyond that. If by any chance a crewmember had managed to escape the Tritonians’ depredations, they might be hiding out in one of those places.

  The forecastle was home to the Egersund’s harpoon cannon.

  Or rather, to what was left of it.

  The large, swivel-mounted device had been dismantled, vandalised, destroyed beyond repair. The shattered debris lay strewn. This cannon wouldn’t launch an explosive-tipped projectile at a redback ever again.

  As Dev surveyed the wreckage, he noticed something odd. The distribution of the broken parts was not as random as it first looked. He took a step back to obtain a better view.

  Yes, the bits of cannon hadn’t just been tossed about any old how.

  They had been heaped up. Arranged.

  The pattern they lay in was essentially symmetrical. There was a shallow arch over two small circles, and then a pair of lines projecting out at acute angles, each ending in a V-shape.

  He studied the pattern from the other side. This way round it resembled a smiley face with strange, angry eyebrows. That didn’t seem right. The first view felt more apt, more meaningful. He wasn’t sure why, wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he was convinced it was the correct way of looking at the pattern. Arch on top, circles, outward-pointing lines at the bottom.

  He summoned Sigursdottir over and showed her what he’d found.

  “Make any sense to you?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “I’m not deluded, though, am I? It’s something the Tritonians put there. They made it on purpose. Yes?”

  “I can’t help but think so. A kind of symbol.”

  “But what’s it for? What does it mean?”

  “Beats me. Must have some significance for them. Maybe it’s a way of marking the ship. Celebrating what they did here.”

  “Or like a gang sign. A graffiti tag.”

  “Possibly. Why don’t we wake Handler up, get him over and ask him? He might know. He might have seen it before.”

  “Good idea. He’s napped long enough anyway. ISS aren’t paying him to –”

  A thunderous boom resounded the length of the Egersund. The ship lurched, throwing Dev and Sigursdottir off-balance.

  “What the – ?” Sigursdottir ran to the port-side gunwale and peered aft. The explosion, or impact, or whatever it had been, had come from that direction.

  Dev, looking over her shoulder, saw a mist of spray hanging in the air and, below it, the sea seething white, effervescing. The carcass of the redback bobbed wildly, rocked by the suddenly turbulent water.

  “We’ve been hit,” he said.

  “No shit,” said Sigursdottir.

  “The Tritonians. They’ve come back for more.”

  “Looks that way. We need to get off this ship before –”

  A second boom shook the whaler, this time coming from its starboard flank.

  “Before that,” Sigursdottir finished. “They’re not content with leaving the Egersund crippled. They want it sunk.”

  Milgrom and Blunt arrived on the forecastle at a run.

  “Sir!” Milgrom said. “I’ve spotted a Tritonian cuttlefish sub just beneath the surface. Looks like it’s going round systematically ramming holes.”

  “Contact Gunnery Sergeant Jiang on the Winterbrook. Tell her to seek and engage.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Blunt, where’s Francis?”

  “Last I saw, she was in the cabins.”

  “Get her out here, if she isn’t on her way already. We are leaving.”

  Milgrom and Blunt activated their commplants and relayed Sigursdottir’s orders. Francis appeared a moment later, and the five of them set off at a mad dash back to the stern ramp.

  The Egersund was struck a third time, then a fourth, a fifth. The whaler was being pierced rapidly and repeatedly and taking on water fast, faster than the sealant injectors could cope with. Dev could feel the ship rolling, wallowing. He and the Marines were going as quickly as they could, given the circumstances. The deck kept heaving this way and that, however, making progress treacherous. You couldn’t be certain your foot would land where you wanted it to. It was like trying to run during an earthquake.

  Yet another blow from the cuttlefish sub sent all five of them sprawling. The Egersund was now letting out a hideous groaning noise. There was a terrifying low rumble as well, coming from deep down inside the vessel – the sound of millions of gallons of seawater flooding in where no seawater belonged.

  Sigursdottir dragged Dev back upright by the scruff of his neck, and the five of them continued running.

  “What does Jiang think she’s playing at?” Francis said. “Why hasn’t the Winterbrook pinged that sub and blown the fucker in half?”

  “Easier said than done,” Sigursdottir replied. “Cuttlefish subs can shift. Anyway, that’s not our concern right now. Getting our backsides off this thing before it goes down is what matters.”

  The last hundred metres to the ramp was a rollercoaster of ups and downs and sideways twists. The Egersund didn’t seem to know what it wanted to do – pitch, yaw, sink – so it did all three at once. Dev felt as though he and the Marines were fleas on the back of an irate mule which wanted rid of them but instead of scratching them off was trying to dislodge them by bucking.

  They threw themselves onto the ramp and slid down, spinning helplessly, flailing, until they hurtled off the end, into the sea.

  The instant he hit the water, Dev felt his under-lids snap into place and his gills flare. He looked around and saw Milgrom striking for the surface with mighty sweeps of her arms and legs. She was toting at least fifty kilogrammes of equipment, but didn’t seem encumbered at all. The other three Marines were swimming upward too.

  A large shape flitted at the periphery of his vision. Thalassoraptor? Not again, surely!

  No, it was something else. Something that was both sea beast and more than that.

&n
bsp; It looked like a huge cephalopod, perhaps thirty metres long, with a smooth conical body covered in mottled markings and a cluster of arms trailing behind its head. It used jet propulsion to move, sucking in and squirting out water through a ventral siphon. A fringe of fine lateral fins helped it steer.

  Yet it was not wholly a living thing. The globes of its eyes were hollow and transparent, and inside each sat a Tritonian. The indigenes were clearly pilots, somehow controlling the cephalopod.

  This, then, was a cuttlefish sub. And as Dev watched, it darted off, so fast it was almost lost from view in just a couple of seconds. A swift about-face, and it returned just as fast, if not faster, to slam into the stricken Egersund with impressive force.

  Rivets popped. Seams split. Yet another fissure appeared in the whaler’s hull.

  Dev, meanwhile, was reeling, semi-concussed by the cuttlefish sub’s impact with the ship. His eardrums felt as though someone had punched them with an awl.

  The bizarre organic submarine wheeled away from the Egersund, preparing to deliver further attacks. Then it seemed to have a change of heart. It came about and coasted towards Dev, manoeuvring with delicate pulses of its fins until it was face to face with him.

  Dev trod water blearily. His head had not yet cleared. He felt stunned and groggy.

  The cuttlefish sub finned a little closer still so that the Tritonian pilots in their eye socket cockpits could get a better look at him. They exchanged glances across the few metres of cephalopod head between them. Photophores flashed, but Dev could not quite make out what was being expressed. Curiosity? Puzzlement? No, something a bit stronger, a bit more indignant than that.

  He tried to ‘speak’ himself, reaching inside for feelings of surrender and goodwill. He had no wish to be rammed by the cuttlefish sub as the Egersund had been. A direct, head-on blow from it would mash him to pulp.

  His face tingled but he wasn’t sure he was radiating the message he intended. The acquiescent sentiments he was striving to convey seemed muddled somehow. There was apprehension in there. Doubt. A hint of confusion.

  It would have been better had he been less dazed. Clarity of mind would have brought purity of emotion.

  As it was, the Tritonians’ own faces registered jade-green bafflement shot through with ruby-red ripples of contempt. They weren’t sure what Dev was saying but they knew they didn’t like it.

  Or him.

  The vast bulk of the Egersund continued to sink slowly in the background while the cuttlefish sub thrust past Dev, then swung round so that its arms were facing him.

  A pair of tentacles unfurled towards him with a languid, python-like grace. They were lined with suckers and tipped with diamond-shaped pads with a soft, prehensile dexterity. They groped for Dev, and he understood, with a surge of panic, that the Tritonians were planning to take him prisoner. Either that or rend him limb from limb with the tentacles.

  The panic was like a bolt of lightning in his brain, a sudden, sharp flash, dispelling confusion.

  Dev’s hand went to the hypervelocity pistol at his hip. One of the features of the gun – a reason it was a favourite among Marines – was that it worked underwater.

  The tips of the tentacles were around him, almost enfolding him, as he brought the HVP up to fire.

  Just as his finger tightened on the trigger, however, the tentacles retracted. They re-joined the cuttlefish sub’s arm cluster, folding together neatly beneath.

  Dev had time to wonder if the pilots were responding to the threat of the HVP. A sabot round could easily sever one of those tentacles.

  Then he became aware of a second craft hovering nearby, just behind him. This one had the kite-like outline of a manta or a stingray, with gently undulating wingtips and a tail ridged with dorsal fins.

  Another organic submarine, the bulbous eyes mounted at its front housing another pair of pilots.

  One of the pilots was busy communicating with the two Tritonians in the other vessel. Dev watched incredibly complex light patterns flicker over their faces, a back-and-forth three-way dialogue. The exchange moved too swiftly and was too convoluted for him to follow properly, but he got the gist of it.

  The manta sub pilot appeared to be saying that the human – Dev – was to be left alone. The cuttlefish sub pilots were unhappy about this and felt that no human, not even one who was part-Tritonian, should be immune from harm. Their wrath was great, as proved by the punishment they and their fellows had meted out on the giant surface ship that would soon be afloat no more. No one should escape it.

  The manta sub pilot insisted that Dev should be spared. He was...

  Dev could not really grasp the next bit.

  Different? Unusual? Rare?

  He had the impression that the manta sub pilot was talking from experience, as though Dev was a known quantity.

  Peering, he realised that they had met before. At least, he thought so. It was the female Tritonian who had helped save him from the thalassoraptor. Her co-pilot was the male who had killed the predator deftly with his spear.

  Dev wasn’t one hundred per cent sure it was the same two Tritonians. He wasn’t familiar enough with the indigenes to distinguish them one from another easily. Their features were all somewhat similar, and he hadn’t yet worked out which physical characteristics were the crucial ones, the ones to look for in order to tell them apart.

  But the female had that scarified nautilus design at her breastbone. How many other Tritonians bore that?

  He didn’t know the answer, but it was too much of a coincidence to disregard, especially when she was defending him to other members of her race as though he and she weren’t strangers.

  The question of why the Tritonian couple happened to be here, hundreds of kilometres south of Tangaroa, in the exact same spot at the exact same moment as Dev, was something he would have to address later. For now, he was simply glad that the female was interceding on his behalf, making the case for him being allowed to live.

  It looked as though she was winning the argument, too. The Tritonians in the cuttlefish sub were exhibiting less hostility, more consent. The lights on their faces suggested that they considered themselves satisfied with the havoc they had wrought on the Egersund and its crew. One more human death, one fewer – what did they care?

  If sighing had been possible underwater, Dev would have breathed a sigh of relief.

  Three things happened next, in quick succession.

  First, the Egersund seemed to have had enough. It had taken on too much water. It could no longer stay upright. It gave in.

  The whaler slowly capsized, with a roar of tortured metal and roiling water. It was like watching a mountainside collapsing, a steady, unremitting black avalanche. The sea erupted into a nightmare of turbulence as the ship’s quarter-million tonnage bore down into it, and down, and further down.

  Dev felt himself being pushed bodily backwards by the wake of the ship’s collapse. Both the cuttlefish sub and the manta sub were shaken about, too.

  The second thing that happened was that hands seized Dev under the armpits and he was hauled away from the capsizing Egersund and the Tritonian submarines. He glimpsed diving gear – wetsuits, full-foot swim fins, compact oxygenated-crystal rebreathers – and could only assume he had been grabbed by Marines from the Admiral Winterbrook. The divers had turbine-driven jetpacks on their backs and were forging through the water at close to twenty knots.

  The third thing was a subaquatic explosion, a fireball blossoming somewhere by the Tritonian vessels, a sphere of brilliance encased in a glassy shell of bubbles. The detonation was sharp-sounding, a brief noise-spike amid the ongoing cacophony of the Egersund’s demise.

  The afterimage of the explosion lingered in Dev’s retinas like a gibbous moon as the Marines spirited him further and further away from the scene of chaos. They were travelling so fast that he found it hard to breathe. All he could do was keep his head tucked in, open his mouth as wide as it would go, and suck in as much as he could of the water su
rging past.

  He hoped he could last. He hoped he wouldn’t black out. He hoped the Marines would slow down before he did lose consciousness and couldn’t force water through his gills anymore. He hoped he wasn’t going to become the first amphibious human being ever to drown.

  17

  BY THE TIME Dev was safely aboard the Admiral Winterbrook, the excitement was over.

  The Egersund was gone, plummeting through thousands of fathoms into the icy gulfs of Triton’s ocean, dragging the redback carcass with it. An oil slick, a smattering of flotsam and a patch of troubled sea were all that was left to show for it.

  The manta sub and the cuttlefish sub were gone too. Gunnery Sergeant Jiang had deployed three torpedoes against the Tritonian vessels. After the first of them detonated, the submarines had dived; the next two torpedoes had been fired more to deter a return visit than in hopes of scoring a hit.

  Dev’s subaquatic saviours were Private Reyes and Private Cully, the team’s diving experts. Their brief had been to drag him clear of the danger zone, then rendezvous with the catamaran once Jiang had determined that the Tritonians had skedaddled. The fact that they had almost killed him during the rescue was not something Dev would hold against them. Alive was alive, however you got there.

  Sigursdottir tore into him, demanding to know what he’d thought he was doing. “Why didn’t you head for the surface like the rest of us? Why’d you hang back? What was going through your tiny little mind?”

  “It’s complicated. There was that cuttlefish sub...”

  “So you thought you’d stop and sightsee, is that it? Just float there like an idiot, making a target of yourself.”

  “I was communicating. The Tritonians were curious about me, and I had an idea I might be able to negotiate with them.”

  “And then another bunch of them came along, and you were basically pincered. They could have taken you out any time they liked. Lucky for you, Reyes and Cully were suited up and ready to go. I had them on standby just in case. If they hadn’t swooped in and grabbed you when they did...”