The search seemed fruitless. He presumed Ethel had quit the area, and he wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. Mazu was not a safe place to be, as long as the Ice King was loitering around.
It even crossed his mind that the Ice King might have caught and eaten the manta sub and its two occupants. The Marines had been keeping it busy with their diversions and their harrying attacks, but there’d been periods when the monster had submerged out of sight and its whereabouts had been unclear. Maybe during one of these intervals Ethel had unwarily strayed into its path.
He rejected the idea. She was too canny to allow that to happen.
He came across the manta sub almost without realising. It was using Mazu for cover, hiding right up under the base of one of the domes, next to an anchor column, dark amid darkness. Ethel spotted him and beamed a greeting, a flicker of warm welcome brightness like a lighthouse on a cloudy night.
You’ve stuck around, he said through the cockpit’s corneal membrane.
I told you. I want to see the Ice King get its comeuppance.
Dev outlined the methods the Marines were using to ensure the Ice King stayed put.
Sounds dangerous, Ethel said. Can they manage it much longer?
If they don’t, it won’t be for lack of trying. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to draw the Ice King back here if it decides it’s had enough and leaves. I know that’s a lot to ask, but...
I can do my best. The manta’s worn out. I’m not sure how much more I can ask from it today. Another sprint might kill it.
The kid chipped in. We could fetch help. Reinforcements.
Who? said Dev. Who do you have in mind?
People. Anyone in the region. Seems to me a single manta sub isn’t much compared to the Ice King, but if there are dozens of subs, hundreds of them...
Ethel looked at the kid, and there was no hiding the surprise she was feeling, or how impressed she was.
How quickly could you gather these reinforcements? Dev asked. Where would you find them?
I don’t know. Depends. Back where the drift cluster was destroyed would be a good place to start looking.
Then what are you waiting for?
Ethel turned back to Dev. It may not be enough. I can’t guarantee we’ll return with anyone at all.
Frankly I’d prefer it if you weren’t here anyway, he said. In case things go belly up and the Ice King pummels the entire township to pieces. Don’t want you getting caught up in that.
Noble of you, but I can take care of myself.
I know. It just had to be said.
Good luck, ungilled. Survive this if you can.
You too. Both of you.
The manta sub pivoted about and winged downward. Just when it was almost too deep to be seen, it levelled out and began swimming horizontally, on a course that would take it back towards Opochtli.
It was a slim hope that Ethel and the kid would find Tritonians willing and able to pitch in and help. Even the faint prospect of backup, though, beat the thought of having none whatsoever.
60
THE ICE KING whittled away at Mazu, responding to each and every provocation the Marines threw at it.
Soon the township was pitted with gaps where domes had stood, and dotted with charred, smouldering wreckage. It was like an organ that had turned cancerous, riddled and rotten.
The Marines ran, goaded, evaded, ran again, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs. Sigursdottir orchestrated the sorties, reacting to airborne reconnaissance intel offered by either Milgrom or Blunt.
The Ice King didn’t appear to tire, but the law of diminishing returns set in. More and more dramatic stunts were required from the Marines to spark retaliation from the gargantuan crab. It was growing wise to their ruses.
Then, perhaps inevitably, the Marines started taking casualties.
Fakhouri was the first.
No one could be quite sure what happened to her. No one saw. Fakhouri was on her own, hatching some new scheme for attracting the Ice King’s attention. There were spurts of gunfire, followed by a scream that was cut short.
Fakhouri!
“Fakhouri!”
The other Marines called for her, both aloud and via commplant. She didn’t answer.
“Fuck,” said Milgrom eloquently. “Fuck the fucking fucker.”
At Fakhouri’s last known position they found a footbridge broken in two, and blood. Blood on the bridge. Blood in the water. Much too much blood.
Reyes was next. She and Cully had been dispatched to set up a perimeter around the largest remaining intact section of the township, a pair of medium-sized apartment domes. Sigursdottir intended to use this area as a last refuge, a redoubt they could retreat to if – more likely when – Mazu became dangerously unstable. Explosive charges could be remote detonated to sever the section’s ties to the rest of the township and isolate it. That way, should Mazu sink, it wouldn’t drag this makeshift life raft down with it.
Reyes was underwater, attaching one set of charges to the end of a footbridge. Cully was on lookout duty. Both she and Reyes had an amplified lung capacity and an enhanced oxygen capture efficiency rate. They could hold their breath for three minutes with little difficulty.
Reyes was due to come up for air when Cully noticed that the sea had taken on a strange, unnatural texture. It had developed a kind of turbid smoothness, like a saucepan of water on a rolling boil.
An immense shape passed below. Cully saw the reddish-brown of the Ice King’s carapace. It was so close she could make out the bumps and craters that covered it, like the surface of some uncolonised desert planet.
Then it was gone, and she waited for Reyes to show her face. She gave her a full minute, knowing that, in emergency, Reyes was just about capable of staying submerged for that extra length of time.
Then she dived in.
Reyes was easy to find.
At least, half of Reyes was.
She was clinging to the underside of the footbridge, arms hooked over the support braces.
From the waist down, however, she was gone. The Ice King had sliced her in two while she had been dangling there. Cully imagined Reyes holding herself as still as possible, hoping against hope that the Ice King would not spot her.
Already, fish were collecting around Reyes’s entrails and wriggling up into her stomach cavity.
Cully scrambled back out onto the footbridge and vomited copiously. Then she announced the news of Reyes’s death over the commplant link and described the grisly circumstances involved.
Sigursdottir had only cold comfort for everyone.
Ice King’s getting wilier. Sneakier. We need to be even more vigilant than before. Can’t let our guard down for a second.
She instructed Cully to continue laying the charges but not take any unnecessary risks while doing so. Cully assented, and Dev could only admire her bravery. Agreeing to carry on the work that had just cost her colleague her life...
With over an hour left before the Astounding’s scheduled arrival, Blunt became the Ice King’s next victim.
She was struggling to keep control of her hoverdrone, concentrating on her commplant rather than on her surroundings.
That was how the Ice King was able to catch her unawares.
The gargantuan crab rose up under the esplanade she was standing on. The impact fractured sheet steel and sent Blunt hurtling several metres into the air. She landed in the water, and as soon as she surfaced and orientated herself, she started swimming.
The Ice King reached for her with the very tip of one pincer and managed to snare her leg just above the knee. The act had a kind of delicacy, like taking hold of a single strand of hair with a pair of tweezers.
Blunt felt herself being pulled back, reeled in. She swung round and emptied an entire clip from her sidearm into the pincer.
When that had no appreciable effect – not that she had thought it would – she unclipped a Ninety-Nine Point Nine from her belt, just as Francis had done. She resolved to sell herse
lf dearly to the Ice King, copying the example of her comrade and very close friend.
Perhaps the Ice King saw this coming. Perhaps it remembered all too clearly the pain Francis had inflicted on it.
Its solution was to release Blunt – by snipping clean through her leg.
Blunt clambered out of the water, shivering with shock, numbed. That was how Dev and Milgrom found her a minute later, after she had sent out a distress call.
Den tourniqueted the stump of Blunt’s leg with a strip of fabric torn from his tunic, while Milgrom administered a shot of fentanyl citrate to anaesthetise her. They carried her to the plaza of the central dome, where Handler draped a polyimide thermal blanket over her which he had requisitioned from a nearby hardware store. She lay beside Jiang, who remained unconscious.
Sigursdottir removed her helmet to scrub a hand back and forth over her hair, which was plastered to her scalp by sweat and rain. She delivered a sour assessment of the situation.
“Four down, an hour to go, and the Ice King’s messing with us. Bastard’s figured out how to get to us. It’s picking us off one by one, and it knows there’s not a thing we can do to stop it.”
“Putting a positive spin on that,” said Dev, “the Holy Crabbiness isn’t going anywhere in a hurry. It’s having too much fun now. It’s got into the game.”
“In other words, we’ve succeeded.”
“A bit too well. Hooray for us.”
“You said your Tritonian pals are fetching reinforcements.”
“I said they said they’d try.”
“No sign of them so far.”
Dev raised his hands and let them drop. “It wasn’t a definite. Maybe they can’t find anyone, or maybe Tritonians are a great deal smarter than us and can’t see the attraction in making themselves bait for a vast murderous crustacean.”
“The novelty’s sure as shit wearing off for me,” said Milgrom, with a sombre glance at the space where Blunt’s leg ought to have been.
Sigursdottir was about to reply when the entire dome reverberated like a gong. Something had struck it from below.
“No prizes for guessing who that was,” she said.
The dome resounded again, the plaza floor shuddering. A geodesic panel fell from the roof and shattered nearby into a thousand fragments of polycarbonate.
“Right. The Ice King’s located us. We fall back to the redoubt.”
Cully, those charges set yet?
Cully confirmed that she had just finished placing the final one.
We’re on our way.
Milgrom scooped up Blunt, cradling her in her arms as though she were a child. Dev hoisted Jiang onto his back in a piggyback. She lay against him, head lolling on his shoulder, dead weight. Light enough to carry, though, even for someone without Milgrom’s modified musculature.
The dome shook a third time, and the plaza floor erupted upwards. The tip of a pincer smashed through from below, accompanied by a liberal spray of seawater.
Sigursdottir took point, followed by Handler, then Dev and Milgrom with their respective loads.
“That exit ahead,” she said. “Then the second dome along.”
The Ice King widened the hole it had created, working its claw round, crumbling the edges. Water sluiced across the floor like combers rolling in over a beach. The humans found themselves suddenly wading shin-deep in ocean. They slogged on towards the exit, while the dome screeched around them as if in protest, objecting to the indignities being perpetrated on it by the Ice King.
The pincer enlarged the hole to the point where it could fit through unimpeded. The Ice King reached inside the dome, probing. Its claw crashed against street furniture, lampposts, a shopfront, café tables, as it groped blindly around.
When it failed to find any prey to latch onto, the Ice King withdrew its arm, then punched more holes in the base of the dome.
All at once the plaza was flooded from end to end. Water boiled up, engulfing the shattered remnants of what had been, until a couple of minutes ago, a tidy, well-ordered communal space.
The dome tipped at a sharp angle just as Dev, Handler and the Marines arrived at the doors that led outside. They began sliding backwards, downhill. They scrabbled for purchase, battling to stay upright.
Milgrom stuck out a leg to catch Sigursdottir as she went slithering past. She booted her commanding officer unceremoniously back up to the door. Sigursdottir clutched on to the handle and swung the door open.
Handler hauled himself through. Dev went next, bent forward, knock-kneed, back flat in order to maintain his balance and stop Jiang tumbling off him.
The group scurried around the dome’s perimeter walkway, leaning to compensate for the acute angle it now lay at. They veered off onto the first available footbridge, which was raised out of the water at one end. They slip-skidded down to the other side.
Behind them, the main dome sank ponderously thunderously under the waves. The footbridge they had just crossed snapped in two, as did all the other footbridges radiating off the dome.
Now Mazu had lost its core, its epicentre, its nucleus, and the township became an agglomeration of loosely connected components. These began to detach and drift apart, driven away from one another by the bludgeoning force of the storm.
Cully, get ready. Soon as we reach you, blow all the charges.
Even as Sigursdottir gave the order, the group came within sight of the redoubt. They crossed an outdoor recreation area, a section of town that was flat as a lilypad, holding multiple-purpose games courts, a children’s playground and a climbing wall. They didn’t know whether the Ice King was chasing them. It didn’t really matter. Mazu was succumbing, the entire structure in its death throes. They weren’t running from anything, they were running towards the only place left to run to.
The instant they were across the footbridge to the nearer of the two apartment domes, Cully transmitted the detonation command. As one, the charges blew, disconnecting the two domes from everything around them.
Now this barbell-shaped remnant of Mazu was all they had left. It was where they would, if necessary, make their final stand against the Ice King.
61
SIGURSDOTTIR DIDN’T LET them rest even for a moment.
“We commandeer one of the higher apartments. Use that as our base.”
An outside staircase provided access to the dome’s narrowing tiers of residential accommodation. On the topmost level, they arrived at a locked door.
“I’ve got a size seven key,” said Sigursdottir, kicking it down.
They piled into a two-bedroom penthouse apartment with a curved balcony.
Cully took up lookout position on the balcony. Dev dumped Jiang onto a bed. Milgrom did likewise with Blunt.
Outside, everything was cacophony. The howl of the storm was interspersed with ear-splitting wails and shrieks as Mazu was torn asunder by the driving wind and waves. Inside, crockery and glassware rattled on shelves, furniture legs drummed on the floor, windows shook in their frames.
Sigursdottir cast a solemn, appraising eye over the two injured Marines.
“Jiang’s probably got a cerebral oedema,” she said. “Only reason anyone’d be out for so long. Blunt looks stable but the blood loss will have been severe. These two need proper medical attention, not whatever we can rustle up from our first aid kits. If the Astounding doesn’t get here soon...”
“If the Astounding doesn’t get here soon,” Handler said, “we’re all dead anyway, so it won’t make a difference.”
“It’ll come. Captain Maddox won’t let us down.”
“I’m not one for speeches –” Dev began.
“Could’ve fooled me,” Milgrom butted in. “I don’t think I’ve met anyone who finds it as hard to keep their trap shut as you do.”
“Conceded. I just want to say, though, that you’ve done everything you can, all of you, and you’ve done it well. I’ve been part of teams before. I served with some of the best and brightest during the war. Some real dunderheads a
s well, but that’s another story. You guys have been outstanding. If we die today –”
“Seriously, give it a rest, Harmer. Save the schmaltz for some other time. We’re not going to die today.”
“All evidence to the contrary,” Handler muttered.
“I’m with Milgrom,” said Sigursdottir. “If you want a group hug moment, you’re shit out of luck. We’ve still got a job to do, and it isn’t over until it’s over.”
Dev shrugged. “Well, that’s me shot down in flames. All I was trying to do was boost morale. From now on I’ll keep my proud-to-have-known-you sentiments to myself.”
“When you’re around Marines, that would be advisable. Milgrom? Hoverdrone up, please.”
“On it, lieutenant. Juice is running low, though. Flying in the storm.”
“I don’t suppose I’m included in that ‘well done, all of you,’ am I?” said Handler as the two Marine officers departed from the room.
“Don’t suppose you are, Mishandler.”
Handler’s lip curled. “A new nickname.”
“I give them to people I dislike sometimes, as well as people I like.”
“For the umpteenth time, I haven’t done anything wrong. I was only following ISS protocol. I contacted central office for instructions as soon as the growth vat flagged up problems with your host form. They pointed me in the direction of the nucleotide serum.”
“And you applied the first dose before I was even was installed?”
“Yes. I’ll admit to that. But again, it was protocol. Maddox was quite clear that the serum needed to be put to work as soon as possible. The cellular breakdown had already begun while the host form was still in the vat. The sooner we started retarding it, the better.”
“Wait, what did you just say?”
“I said, the sooner we started retarding it...”
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