“I got it fending off one of the fuckers from my boat. He boarded while I was laying out my nets. Just popped up out of the briny onto the main deck, bold as you please, like this was his property and I was trespassing, and not the other way round. Had one of those ivory spears they like to carry. Well, I wasn’t going to stand for any of that crap, was I? Neither were my shipmates.”
“Of course you weren’t. Now please, let my guy there go.”
Gutting Knife pressed the cutting edge of the blade harder against Handler’s skin. Handler hissed in panic and shot Dev a frantic, pleading stare.
“So we laid into him,” Gutting Knife continued, “the three of us: me, my bosun, my first mate. He was an agile bastard, I’ll give him that. Hopped about the place like a flea. But he was young, inexperienced. Looked like he was a teenager, maybe, no older than that. Reckon he was trying to prove his manliness or something, the way kids do.”
“So it was three grown men versus a child. You must be proud of yourselves.”
Handler glowered, his eyes saying, Antagonise him, why don’t you?
But Dev knew he was going to be able to end the standoff only through patience and needling. He wanted to lull Gutting Knife into a false sense of security and at the same time keep him rattled. That way, with Dev veering between guile and aggression, Gutting Knife wouldn’t be thinking straight; couldn’t be sure whether or not he was being played. His confusion would eventually give Dev an opening, an opportunity to leap in and neutralise him.
Or so Dev hoped. Nothing was guaranteed here except Gutting Knife’s unpredictability. There could be a successful outcome, or there could be Xavier Handler on the ground, windpipe slashed wide, aspirating his own blood.
“We did what we had to,” Gutting Knife said. “How were we to know he wasn’t an ambush? How were we to know there weren’t a dozen more of them about to jump out and surprise us? We took the sea monkey out; anyone would.”
“But not before he got you a good one to the face.”
“Yeah, and he paid for it. He’s still...” Gutting Knife blinked and twitched his head. “He paid for it all right. That’s all I have to say.”
All at once the man was looking guilty as sin and Dev was getting the same aura of defensiveness and furtiveness off him that he’d noticed earlier among the other townspeople. If anything, it was stronger with Gutting Knife, more overt.
There wasn’t time to cross-examine him, however. Out of the corner of his eye, Dev spied Gaff Hook clambering up the balustrade, shedding water. If Gaff Hook chose to go on the offensive again, Dev’s attention would be divided and he’d be in no position to save Handler. The ISS liaison’s fate would be entirely up to Gutting Knife.
Dev needed to wrap things up right now. No more pussyfooting around.
“Listen, this can go either of two ways,” he said. “You kill him, and I beat the shit out of you. Or I get to you before you kill him, and I still beat the shit out of you, only not so badly. You walk away.”
“You’re saying whatever happens, I lose. Are you trying to negotiate with me here? Because it doesn’t seem like you’ve got the hang of bargaining.”
Handler appeared to agree. His gills were flapping and flaring anxiously.
Dev signalled reassurance to him using his photophores. Their glow was less perceptible out of the water, in broad daylight, but Handler got the message nonetheless.
Dev then, using the same medium, warned him to brace himself.
“What are you doing?” Gutting Knife demanded. “That fucking light-show stuff. Stop it! It isn’t natural.”
“Last chance,” Dev said. Gaff Hook was on this side of the balustrade now, lowering himself awkwardly, hampered by his bum arm. “Give up, and I’ll go easy on you.”
Gutting Knife sneered.
Dev flashed an alert to Handler, urging him to shunt himself backwards.
Handler, to his credit, did as requested, with scarcely any hesitation. He pushed his shoulder hard into Gutting Knife’s chest, with almost his whole weight behind it.
Briefly, Gutting Knife was taken aback.
Dev sprang. He grasped Gutting Knife’s blade hand in both of his before the man could recover his equilibrium. He twisted it round sharply and savagely enough to separate the carpal bones from the radius and ulna.
Gutting Knife could only scream at the sudden, searing pain. The blade fell. Dev pressed home the advantage, bringing his adversary to his knees with a stamp to his instep, then stoving in a few ribs with a vicious toecap kick.
After that there was little Gutting Knife could do except writhe on the ground in agony, clutching his side.
There was little Gaff Hook could do either except make a run for it. His friend had been disarmed and reduced to a pitiful, howling wreck. He had no desire to end up the same way, and he could tell he wouldn’t stand a chance, injured as he already was, against the weird half-human, half-Tritonian hybrid. Cradling his limp arm, he scuttled away as fast as his legs would carry him.
“Well done,” Dev said, patting Handler on the biceps. “You did good.”
The ISS liaison looked relieved but still shaken. “He could have... He nearly...”
“But he didn’t, did he? That’s the main thing. And you were a part of it. You acted. Give yourself a pat on the back.”
The Marines had finally got Milgrom under control and were hustling her towards the food court exit. Sigursdottir beckoned commandingly to Dev and Handler.
“We are out of here,” she said. “Now. Most ricky-tick.”
As they made their way towards the boats, Dev remarked to her, “That could have gone better.”
“Don’t gloat, Harmer. Don’t you dare. I’m pissed off enough as it is. This is on me. I let it get out of hand. I should have nipped it in the bud while I could. Maddox will tear me a new one when he finds out.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t.”
“Of course I’m going to tell. I’ll have to give him a full report. You can’t just cover an incident like this up. Even if I personally don’t let him know, he’ll hear about it some other way. Someone from Llyr will blab, or even lodge a formal complaint. It’s inevitable. And then I’ll be even deeper in the brown.”
“Okay,” Dev said. “Well, let’s deal with that when it happens. But when you do file your report, don’t overlook the fact that the locals were behaving in a squirrelly fashion before things kicked off. There’s something not right here, and they don’t want us knowing what, and that might be why they were as ready to have a scrap as you people were to start one.”
“You know this?”
“Normally I’d call it a gut feeling and that’d be as far as it goes, but the guy I just put in intensive care back there blurted out something that makes me almost certain this town has something to hide. A guilty secret.”
“And you think we should find out what it is.”
“I think it would be a gross dereliction of duty, lieutenant, if we didn’t.”
22
THE TWO BOATS sailed away from Llyr into the gathering dusk at speed, putting as much distance as possible between them and the township. So long and good riddance.
Once Llyr had disappeared over the horizon, however, the Reckless Abandon and the Admiral Winterbrook both came to a dead stop.
Half an hour later, as night fell, the Marine catamaran launched a URIB, an ultralight rigid-hulled inflatable boat, seven metres long and powered by a near-silent electric inboard motor. Manning the central helm console was Private Reyes, with Private Cully at the bow, crouching by the forward-mounted 12.7mm machine gun. The only other occupant was Dev.
Sigursdottir had needed some persuading – but not a lot – to grant Dev permission to return to Llyr. Once he had explained to her just what he thought the townspeople were hiding and how it could be advantageous to the mission, she had given him the go-ahead.
“At least we might be able to salvage something from this fiasco,” she had said.
Ha
ndler had taken a little more convincing, and Dev had had to remind him that he was answerable to Dev, not the other way round, so canvassing his opinion was more a courtesy than anything. Handler acknowledged this and said that as long as he himself didn’t have to go back to Llyr, he supposed he was okay with the idea.
“Spoken like the truly sensible person you are,” Dev had said, adding, “I’m toying with Can Handle Himself In A Fight as a nickname. How about that?”
“Bit of a mouthful,” Handler had replied, “but it’s the best you’ve come up with so far.”
Triton’s twin moons were rising as the URIB bounded across the waves, retracing the course the two bigger boats had just travelled. The collision-damaged one, designated Luna A, was the larger of the satellites but also the more distant. Its intact counterpart, Luna B, was smaller but nearer. By some quirk of astrophysics, their orbits positioned them so that they appeared to be of identical size when viewed from the planet’s surface. Set close together, they gazed down from the sky like a pair of pearly, cataracted eyes.
The moons’ light lent the sea an opalescent dazzle, while the URIB’s wake shimmered a sparkling green as the boat’s progress disturbed the bioluminescent phytoplankton. Soon, manmade illumination was added to the mix: the lights of Llyr, harsh yellow and white against the night sky.
Reyes slowed the URIB to a crawl.
“Close enough?” she asked.
“It’ll do,” Dev replied. “Don’t want anyone spotting us.”
“We’ll hang back here. You get in a jam, send out a call and we’ll come running. Otherwise we’ll wait, and you can RV with us when you’re done.”
“Cool. Thanks.”
“Don’t leave it too long,” said Cully. “Reyes’s conversation gets very boring very quickly.”
“Hey!”
“And she has a tendency to nod off during recces and stakeouts.”
“No, that’s you.”
“Only because you’re so dull you send me to sleep.”
Dev tuned out their banter, focusing on Llyr. About four klicks, he estimated. Shouldn’t be a problem, as long as his body played ball. Since the outbreak of hives earlier, there hadn’t been any fresh symptoms of decay – no more bleeding, no further rashes. Dev felt slightly dizzy, but that was all, and it might be nothing more than mild seasickness. Handler had offered him a nucleotide top-up before he left, but there hadn’t been time to fit it in. He would have it when he returned.
With a farewell nod to the two Marines, Dev dived overboard.
The sea rumbled around him as he swam. The further he got from the URIB, the more he became aware of a plethora of marine sounds. The water was not silent. It was alive with noises – a cacophony of clickings, moans, shrill keening ululations. They came from unseen creatures communicating across distances or finding their way through the darkness by echolocation. Dev felt like he was crossing a crowded bar.
Then there were the visible signs of life, no less plentiful. Lights flashed far below him, flickers of brilliance in every colour of the rainbow. These belonged to the inhabitants of the benthic zone, that realm of perpetual night, and it was like soaring high above a fireworks display, a welter of pulsing fluorescence.
In the shallows, meanwhile, myriad fauna surrounded him – finned things, soft things, cartilaginous things, shelled things, top-lit by moonglow and starshine. Some were hideous, with snaggle teeth or vampiric fangs or lifeless jet-black eyes set beneath beetling brows. Others were fascinating and beautiful, crowned with flowing fairytale fronds or elaborate horny growths, like something a child might dream up. Others still were drab and nondescript, shoals of matt-grey small fry as alike as peas.
Not knowing which species were dangerous and which weren’t, but not wanting to take any chances, Dev gave them all a wide berth. Any creatures that didn’t dart out of his way as he approached, he diverted around or swam under.
He was glad of the HVP at his hip, especially when something large and streamlined loomed up beside him and kept pace with him for a while. It was at least three metres long from its pointed nose to its sickle-shaped tail and it moved with the purposeful ease of a shark. It seemed curious about him but never strayed closer than about thirty metres, so that he couldn’t get a clear view of it, only glimpses of a murky silhouette.
Eventually the big fish lost interest and swam off, but Dev remained on his guard for several minutes after. The beast might still be shadowing him, just from a greater range. He wasn’t taking anything for granted, not in this relentlessly deadly ocean.
From time to time he popped his head above the surface in order to re-establish his bearings. Llyr’s domes, with their jewelling of lights, drew ever nearer.
He reached his destination twenty minutes after leaving the URIB. Having studied a local insite map of the township beforehand, Dev had identified a number of possible targets, but the simplest and most straightforward was an artificial beach, a narrow shelf of sand that sloped down to the waterline. A huge, fine-meshed cage extended around it into the sea, creating a lido that was safe for recreational bathing.
Dev slithered over the pontoons marking the outer rim of the cage and glided through wavelets to the beach, which was deserted except for a couple sharing a smoke. They were young, in their mid-teens.
As he padded across the sand towards them, he caught a bitterly aromatic scent wafting to him on the breeze. He immediately recognised it as cannablast – ordinary marijuana cross-spliced with vroomshroom, a psychotropic fungus found on the forested planet Tau Ceti E.
Even though vroomshroom had not been shown to have any long-lasting side effects and the high it produced, while acute, was only short-lived, it was still classified as a class-A drug, meaning cannablast was borderline illegal.
Dev suppressed a smile.
Good for these kids.
Good for him, too.
They didn’t notice him until he was almost on top of them. The boy made a half-hearted, ham-fisted attempt to hide the joint, masking it inside his cupped palm, while the girl stared up at Dev, frowning in puzzlement. They were both pretty stoned. Their eyes shone glassily in the moonlight.
“Are you...?” the girl said. “What are you? You’re a bit like... but you’re not.”
“You must be that dude,” said the boy croakily. “The one who represents us to the Tritonians. Our whatchemacall – ambassador. Right?”
He had mistaken Dev for Handler, which was understandable. As far as most settlers knew, there was only one amphibious human on the planet.
“Shit, you’re not here to bust us, are you?” The girl’s expression turned fraught. “Oh, man, Ty, I said we shouldn’t smoke outside. I told you. I knew someone would catch us.”
The boy called Ty said, “He’s not anybody with any, like, legal power. He can’t arrest us. Can you, mister?”
“No,” said Dev.
“See, Aletha? Relax.”
“You grow that yourself?” Dev asked, gesturing to the poorly concealed joint.
Shy pride lit up Ty’s face. “Yup. Got a mini hydroponics lab set up in my cupboard at home. Seeds cost a fortune, but worth it. I mean, what else are you going to do to pass the time out here? I don’t even want to be on this shit hole. It’s a pimple on the butt-end of the galaxy.”
“Yeah,” said Aletha, “but Dad thought it’d be an adventure for us. Get away from it all in the back of beyond. Live off the land, so to speak. A new start after our mother waltzed off with her zero-gee yoga instructor.”
Brother and sister, Dev realised. Not boyfriend and girlfriend.
“So he’s off farming kelp all day, happy as a pig in shit,” said Ty. “Only good thing for me and Aletha is he’s too busy to keep tabs on us.”
“He’s got a girlfriend, too, so he’s kind of distracted,” Aletha added. “As long as he doesn’t get an alert from TerCon Curriculum that we’ve fallen behind with our schoolwork, we’re pretty much left to our own devices.”
“Okay,” Dev
said. “Well, here’s the deal. I should report you to the authorities for cultivation and possession of a controlled substance. Difficult for me not to, really, since as an ambassador I’m sort of the authorities myself.”
Their faces fell.
“But you could do me a favour instead, and in return I won’t breathe a word to anyone.”
“Name it,” Ty and Aletha said, practically in unison.
“I have reason to believe that people in Llyr are keeping a Tritonian imprisoned.”
The two kids exchanged looks.
“I haven’t heard about any –” Ty began, but Dev cut him off.
“Don’t try bullshitting me. Everyone in town knows about it, including you. A Tritonian, a male, probably around your age, got taken captive by some fishermen a few days ago. He’s somewhere here, and I’d like to know where.”
It was partly bluff. Dev wasn’t 100% certain.
But he remembered how Gutting Knife had broken off mid-sentence when describing how he had dealt with the Tritonian who boarded his boat: Yeah, and he paid for it. He’s still... And he had lamely corrected himself: He paid for it all right. That’s all I have to say.
He’s still paying for it. That was what he was going to say.
And if the Tritonian was “still paying for it,” that implied he was in Llyr, being held against his will and most likely abused. Which would explain the townspeople’s collective antsiness when a squad of Marines had turned up. They’d thought someone had squealed and the military had come to investigate.
“I haven’t got all night,” Dev insisted. “You might as well come clean.”
Ty and Aletha looked truly intimidated, and he hated playing the bullying, mean-spirited establishment figure with them. He understood exactly how they felt: trapped on Triton, thousands of light years from anywhere worth being, bored, resentful, craving some kind – any kind – of escape. He’d known a young man just like them, fond of narcotics and resentful of parents and officialdom. He had been that young man, and there were words for the way he was acting now and the kindest of them was hypocrisy.
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