World of Water

by James Lovegrove

  We’ll carry on until we’re absolutely certain the Ice King won’t return there.

  And when our manta subs get tired...? They will sooner or later.

  Ethel’s response manifested as a dim, ambiguous mix of cobalt and charcoal-grey. The Ice King may tire first.

  Rendering the phrase “And pigs might fly” into Tritonese was tricky. The nearest Dev could get to it was And flying fish mightn’t fly, which made very little sense even to him and was met with stony incomprehension from Ethel.

  As the chase continued, Dev wished he had some way of communicating with the Admiral Winterbrook. He was confident the catamaran was still overhead, doggedly tracking the Ice King. Sigursdottir may well have deduced from the sonar imagery what the manta sub was up to. At the very least she would realise the monster and the sub were locked in a deadly pursuit.

  What she ought to know was that there was a Polis+ conspiracy afoot on Triton and that a passenger on her boat, Xavier Handler, was involved somehow. Handler might well be a mere pawn. He might, though, be instrumental in the plot.

  He might even be a Plusser himself.

  The notion, as soon as it popped into Dev’s mind, made his stomach go sour. A Polis+ agent masquerading as an ISS liaison. The Plussers somehow managing to infiltrate Interstellar Security Solutions. Putting one of their own right into the heart of the corporation that made a profit from combating them.

  Shit.

  That would be a kicker, wouldn’t it? The ultimate inside job.

  And yet, if true, there was a certain bravura audacity about it. You almost couldn’t help admiring the Plussers’ nerve.

  The manta seemed to sense something. Dev felt it faltering, as though it was in a quandary.

  He looked across quizzically at Ethel, who was also puzzled.

  They turned the sub, only to find that the Ice King had dropped back. A gap of over two hundred metres had opened up between them and it.

  The Ice King simply floated. It looked inconceivably cunning to Dev just then. Inscrutable and calculating.

  What’s it waiting for? he said.

  I don’t know, said Ethel. But I have a very bad feeling about this.

  Think it’s had enough? It’s going to head back to the drift cluster?

  It better not.

  They nudged the manta towards the crab with a few tentative wingbeats.

  The Ice King remained put, observing them with those dark, leeringly knowing eyes.

  Is it... messing with us? Dev said. Trying to sucker us in?

  You mean beat us at our own game? Not sure, but I wouldn’t put something like that past it.

  Let’s hold back. I’m not letting myself get played by a string-of-shit-hanging-out-of-a-fish’s-anus crab.

  Ethel showed amused surprise. You’ve picked up some bad language.

  It’s the company I’ve been keeping.

  The strange standoff stretched on. The Ice King exhibited nothing but a steady, enigmatic patience, as imperturbable as a granite monument. If Dev hadn’t known better, he would have thought that its mouth parts were fixed in a sort of smile.

  The Polis+ agent inside it had an ace up his sleeve. That was the only conclusion Dev could draw. The Plusser knew something Dev and Ethel didn’t.

  Hold on, Dev said. Where’s the other manta? Where are your friends?

  Ethel scanned the sea immediately surrounding the Ice King.

  They were riding its wake, last time we looked, she said. Right behind it.

  Where are they now?

  Ethel’s face went a sickly shade of green, the colour of dread.

  They wouldn’t have abandoned us, she said. Never. “The more of us there are, the greater we are.” What’s happened to them?

  It was as though the Ice King had been waiting for her to ask. This was its cue.

  Its mouth parts unfurled, revealing that they were clasping an object, something they had been masking from sight.

  The other manta sub.

  The Ice King loosened its grip on the sub tauntingly, just a fraction, to give Dev and Ethel a better view. In the manta’s eye socket cockpits, the two Tritonian pilots exuded panic and terror, jaggedly jarring hues of red and green. The manta itself squirmed in the clutches of the crab’s mouth parts, stuck fast, trying in vain to break free.

  No!

  Ethel rammed the steering stalks forward. Dev wrenched his pair of stalks back.

  Don’t, he warned her. That’s what it wants.

  Their manta dithered, paralysed by the conflicting commands it was receiving.

  We can’t leave them to the Ice King’s mercy, Ethel insisted. We have to go and help them.

  The Ice King doesn’t have any mercy. This is a trap. It must have known all along your friends were there, at its rear. It spun round, grabbed them, and now this. It wants us to move in. It wants us within pincer range.

  Let go of those stalks, Ethel demanded. Now.

  We’ll all die if I do.

  We can save them.

  I doubt it.

  They’re not your friends. They’re mine. Do as I say, you heartless ungilled bastard.

  It was one of the toughest calls Dev had ever had to make.

  I can’t, he said. The Ice King is going to kill them whatever happens. Don’t you see that? They’re as good as dead.

  The crab’s mouth parts tightened somewhat, forming a cage around the manta and its pilots, an inescapable imprisonment. The two Tritonians peered out through the bars of their jail like condemned convicts, and Dev watched their agony of fear turn to resignation. They, too, had realised that their situation was hopeless.

  No, Ethel said, desolate.

  The Tritonians signalled fatalistic defiance across the space between the Ice King and Ethel’s manta.

  Don’t forget us, one said.

  Make sure the monster pays, said the other.

  I promise, said Ethel.

  Wearily, reluctantly, she eased back on the steering stalks. The manta edged away from the Ice King.

  The gargantuan crab saw that its bluff had been called. The manta in front wasn’t coming to the aid of the one in its maw.

  The mouth parts moved sideways and apart so as to grasp the manta by the wings. Then, with a slow, cruel deliberateness, as though making a point, the Ice King proceeded to tear the sub apart.

  First it tore the manta in two, like a wishbone. Then it dissected the still twitching halves piecemeal, ripping through cartilage, rending inner organs, splintering bone.

  It managed to save the cockpits, and the Tritonians inside them, for last.

  There was an expression of almost palpable malice on the Ice King’s face as it clamped its mandibles around the manta’s eyes and crushed them.

  The corneas burst.

  Then, as the Ice King continued to apply pressure, the Tritonians burst too.

  Ethel displayed nothing but fiery red loathing.

  Dev felt much the same.

  In a final act of spite, the Ice King did not actually consume any of the manta or its pilots. Instead, as if in sheer contempt, it spat out the whole mess in a churning billow of sundered flesh and ruptured innards.

  Not good enough even for me to eat, was the message.

  And Ethel received it loud and clear, and her hatred curdled to blind rage, and she slammed the steering stalks forward again, and before Dev could counteract the command, the manta was flying straight at the Ice King.

  49

  DEV TRIED TO pull the manta out of the kamikaze divebomb run it was making. He wagged the steering stalks this way and that, but the manta only wobbled, didn’t deviate. Ethel had pure, furious determination on her side. Of the two of them, she was imposing the fiercer will on the manta. Her face screamed revenge.

  The Ice King filled Dev’s field of vision from end to end, every crevice and craggy contour of its front end visible in sharp relief. It looked eager to greet them. Its mouth parts yawned wide, exposing the cavernous, toothless grotto that was its
gullet. Moments from now, it would be feasting on the manta that had led it such a merry dance.

  There was method in Ethel’s apparent madness, however.

  At the last possible instant, just as it seemed the manta was going to pitch headlong into the Ice King’s mouth, she thrust the stalks out to either side and squeezed a nodule on the control column with one knee. The manta veered downward.

  The crab’s mouth parts gesticulated wildly as the sub shot past them, plummeting on a perfect perpendicular trajectory. Down into the depths it went, travelling at such speed that Dev lost his grip on the control column. He sprawled against the rear of the cockpit, pinned by the force of the water jetting in through the rift in the eye’s outer membrane.

  The sea darkened. The silvery light filtering down from the storm-tossed surface faded to grey, then to the colour of ashes, then to a thin, feeble gleam like dawn on a cloudy day.

  Soon the light had leaked away altogether, and there was nothing but blackness.

  Still the manta descended, its pace not slackening. The rush of water within the eye socket was just about the only evidence Dev had that the creature was moving. Visually, there were no clues. Everything outside was like ink, pure unfathomable void.

  Then he glimpsed lights.

  It was the same firework-display illumination he had seen during his nocturnal swim from the URIB to Llyr. It seemed more distant than he remembered, deeper down. He assumed the marine fauna responsible for it took refuge in lower strata of the ocean during daytime, rising after sunset when the ambient light from above dwindled almost to nil. To them, a surrounding darkness was comfort. It was what they were used to. Home.

  As the lights brightened and enlarged, Dev felt a twinge in his ears which developed rapidly into pain. How far down was the manta sub? And how much further did Ethel intend to take it?

  The water began to feel sluggish as it passed through his gills, not to mention cold, as numbingly cold as an arctic wind. It was like breathing iced soup. Every inhalation and exhalation became laborious, an effort.

  And the pain in his ears only increased, until it was a bone-drilling, temple-tormenting agony.

  The water pressure was now intense, a hundred atmospheres or more, and the temperature many degrees below zero. Dev could endure it for the time being, but not for much longer, not if they kept on going.

  Yet they kept on going. The manta did not slow. Ethel drove the sub relentlessly down towards the scintillating patterns of living light, deeper and deeper. Now Dev could hear cracking sounds coming from his skull, the bones of his cranium grinding together along their suture lines. His head felt as though it was going to implode. He knew he was beyond the point where a human diver could safely venture even in a pressurised aluminium-alloy exosuit. No one should be this far down, unprotected.

  They came to the place where the benthic creatures dwelled, the abyssal realm.

  Here, at last, Ethel reduced speed and levelled the manta out. The sub hovered, not quite at rest, and Dev recovered his bearings and peered outside, squinting through his haze of head pain.

  It was like something out of a dream.

  The worst dream imaginable.

  A phantasmagorical cavalcade of sea creatures swept past the cockpit’s corneal membrane, things that didn’t belong in any bestiary, things that had no place in a sane and ordered universe. They seemed like evolutionary castoffs, abortions of nature that had been consigned to this oceanic dungeon because there was nowhere else to put them and they were better left where no one could see them. Lit from within by their own garish bioluminescence, they teemed back and forth, prowling and clashing.

  One was like a bundle of balloons, pallid gas-filled sacs that swelled and shrivelled at different times, inflating and deflating in accordance with some indefinable pattern.

  Another was a ribbed hexagon of skin several metres wide that moved through the water by folding itself into complex geometric shapes.

  There was a largish armoured fish that at first glance seemed to be giving a smaller fish a piggyback ride, until Dev realised that the hanger-on was attached by tentacles which pierced the larger fish just behind the head through a chink in its plated hide. The hitchhiking fish was a parasite, feeding off and controlling the other, using it as a combined larder and transportation. A horrid symbiosis.

  A colony of hydrozoa split into its hundreds of component parts to overwhelm its chosen prey, a doughy, lumpen thing with a face like a clown in a police mugshot. The tiny anemone-like creatures swarmed over their quarry, stung it to death, sawed off a chunk each with minuscule corkscrew teeth, then coalesced back together in a clump to dine, while the chewed, riddled corpse they left behind sank from sight.

  Something a bit like a coelacanth sauntered by, ancient and unhurried, with what appeared to be a dozen tumours dangling from its belly. These were in fact semi-transparent egg sacs, and a developing foetus nestled in each, suckling on pre-digested food piped to it from its mother’s intestinal tract.

  Something revoltingly phallic throbbed along with peristaltic convulsions of its body. When a potential aggressor wandered near, the rubbery tube of meat started everting, prolapsing its intestines through its anal orifice and sucking them back in. It rolled itself inside out like this, over and over, confusing its foe and probably, if Dev’s own reaction was anything to go by, nauseating it too. Eventually the predator, deterred, decided to turn elsewhere for a meal, alighting on a tiny shrimp, which looked as though it would be a delicious mouthful – except that it wasn’t a shrimp at all but a decoy, a shrimp-shaped growth perched on the proboscis of a megamouthed carnivore who promptly swallowed the hapless, bamboozled mark in a single gulp. The trickster didn’t last long enough to enjoy its ill-gotten gains, however, as it was harpooned from below by a spiny projection shot from the snout of a broad, flat crustacean, which reeled the victim in. The crustacean gnawed on the flexing, still living body in a leisurely manner, until...

  But Dev had had enough. Disgust overcame fascination. There was only so much of this grotesque, hallucinatory spectacle he could take. He had done psychedelics in his youth, not often but often enough to know the slippery, lurid delusions a mind could come up with. This was worse; it didn’t have the consolation of being imaginary.

  The manta sub was profoundly uneasy in the midst of the milling crowd of deep-sea horrors. It shied away whenever any of them swam close, and Dev could feel distinct tremors of anxiety running through it. It yearned to be back up in the warm, friendly waters of the photic zone – if perhaps not as much as Dev did.

  Especially when a blobby, spongy animal resembling a brain with fins began nudging through the rip in the cockpit cornea. Dev lashed out with a foot, and the brain blob oozed away, disgruntled.

  He decided he would prefer the security of an intact cockpit, and so he wriggled along the duct to the other eye socket. Movement, physical effort, made his head hurt worse. The pain almost blinded him. Nonetheless he persevered and struggled on through to the other side, slithering down beside Ethel, who looked to be in as much discomfort as he was.

  How long –? he began, but she interrupted.

  Shhh, she said. She pointed upward.

  Something was moving about above them.

  Something enormous.

  The Ice King.

  It had followed them all the way down and it was hunting for them in the dark, looking for them amid the throngs of benthic wildlife. The kicks of its hind legs, the force of its immense bulk pushing through the water, generated powerful currents that rocked the manta. What Dev had taken for fits of trembling was the turbulence set up by the Ice King as it cruised to and fro, roving, searching.

  The glowing, ghastly fauna outside reacted to the Ice King’s presence with a weird apathy. They were too busy preying on one another, caught up in their endless cycle of kill-or-be-killed, to care much about this new arrival, however abundantly vast it was. In a carnage-filled arena, what was one more gladiator?

  A
re we supposed to not talk at all? Dev asked, trying to keep his ‘voice’ as muted as he could. In case the Ice King spots us?

  Ethel answered in equally subdued tones, It’s not the Ice King I’m worried about. It’s everything else. Down here, light is all. Light attracts, repels, communicates, misleads...

  So keep it low, that’s what you’re telling me. If we don’t want to draw unwelcome attention from the freak show out there.

  Speak only when necessary. If they can’t see us, they won’t notice us. As long as we’re silent and the manta stays stationary, we’re invisible.

  Really? One of those things was trying to get into the other cockpit a moment ago.

  It must have bumped up against the manta by accident, that’s all.

  If you say so. Can I ask why we’re hiding out here?

  It was the only place I could think of to go. Somewhere where we could pause. Regroup. Where, if we’re lucky, the Ice King won’t be able to find us.

  Too many other creatures. Too many lights. Interference. I get it. Losing ourselves in a crowd. But the pressure is...

  Unpleasant, yes.

  Mistress of understatement, Dev thought.

  You’ll just have to put up with it, Ethel went on.

  How long do you reckon the Ice King will go on looking before it gives up?

  Your guess is as good as mine. Once he moves off, we’ll resume following him as before, stealthily.

  Okay, but –

  Ethel covered his face with her hands.

  Outside the cockpit, a subaquatic spider was staring in.

  It might not have been a spider in the strict taxonomic sense, but it was sufficiently arachnid to merit the comparison. Big as a limousine, it had a smattering of eyes, a profusion of thin spines that looked like hairs, and a pair of pedipalps set below its mouth. With these long, spindly forelimbs it began gently touching the cornea of the eye, exploring its outline, getting a sense of its shape and texture.

  The manta sub recoiled, which only increased the sea spider’s inquisitiveness. Ethel laid a steadying hand on the steering stalks, and the manta obediently went stock still.