World of Water

by James Lovegrove

  “No. Before that. Did you say Maddox was quite clear?”

  Handler looked flustered, but realised he couldn’t deny it. He’d uttered the name loud and clear. “Yes.”

  “Captain Arkady Maddox?”

  “Who else?”

  “What was he doing giving you advice about the serum?”

  “Well,” said Handler, “he’s the one I got it from.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Dev. “It wasn’t supplied by ISS? It wasn’t something you had handy at the outpost?”

  “No. Nothing of the sort. Central office told me the outpost wasn’t equipped to deal with the problem with your host form, but they knew through back channels that there was a potential solution locally. The serum. It just so happened Maddox had some.”

  “It just so happened,” Dev echoed.

  “Yes. It’s... It’s something the military have been trialling, apparently. A battlefield remedy for fatigue and injury. A way of repairing troops and keeping them going longer, extending their usefulness in combat situations.”

  “So they can fight on even when riddled with bullet holes.”

  “Something like that. Central office instructed me to approach Maddox about it. He had a batch of the serum at Station Ares, and he shipped it over by delivery drone within an hour of my requesting it, pretty much.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this before?” Dev said, voice hollow with exasperation.

  “It didn’t seem relevant,” Handler replied lamely.

  “Didn’t seem – ! You were pumping me full of some crap the military are trialling, and you didn’t think to tell me that at any point? You didn’t think to tell me that you’d got it from Maddox, either. All of this just somehow slipped your mind?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “What, then?”

  “Well... Maddox suggested I shouldn’t.”

  “Shouldn’t...?”

  “Tell you where the serum originated. He assured me it would work, but he felt you wouldn’t take kindly to the idea that it came from a source other than ISS. Your psych evaluation seemed to back him up, in that respect. Given that you’re a war veteran and that you were severely wounded in combat, your trust in the military infrastructure might be... coloured by experience.”

  “And you went along with that?”

  “We’ve already established that Captain Maddox is a hard man to say no to,” said Handler.

  “This is the absolute truth?” Dev insisted. “You’re not bullshitting me?”

  “Why would I lie? Now of all times?”

  “Repeat it in Tritonese.” Dev switched to the other language. You have been giving me an experimental medicine obtained from those whose concern is defeating others.

  I have, said Handler.

  And you had no reason to suspect it wasn’t exactly what you were told it was?

  Why would I? Orders are orders. I obeyed them to the letter.

  “Shit,” Dev said, as the revelation sank in. “All along I’ve been a lab rat.”

  “I’m afraid so. And I’ve been the scientist in the white coat. It simply never occurred to me that the serum could be anything but beneficial. I honestly believed I was helping you. Perhaps I should have had my doubts, but I’m not by nature a suspicious person.”

  No, thought Dev. No. You’re a good little employee, that’s all. A trusting drone. Mindlessly following your directives. The perfect pawn.

  “I think,” he said, “that I may owe you an apology.”

  “I think,” said Handler, “that we’re both owed one. The question is, by whom? ISS or the Marine Corps?”

  “Either. Both. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it, though.”

  “You’ve convinced the serum was causing the symptoms you had? The bleeding, the hives, and so forth?”

  “I am, but there’s only one way to find out for sure.”

  “Which is?”

  “Confront Maddox.”

  “Rather you than me.” Handler gave a shudder that was almost completely mimed, but only almost.

  A shout came from Milgrom in the living room. “People, we have company. Big, shelly company.”

  “The Ice King cometh,” said Handler. “Oh, joy.”

  Dev half laughed. “A wisecrack. Not bad. You’re starting to get the hang of gallows humour. Before now you’d just have been blubbering.”

  “If the past couple of days have taught me anything, it’s how to cope with threats to my life. For that I have you to thank.”

  “All part of the service.”

  The ISS liaison’s mouth turned down at the corners. “There’s a part of me that wishes I’d never had this experience. But on balance I’m glad I have.”

  Dev clapped him on the back. “Join the club. Now let’s go and face our certain doom.”

  62

  THE THREE MARINES were out on the balcony.

  The Ice King was forging a path through the disintegrating township. It shouldered aside wrecked modules and pontoons with its carapace, swimming with monstrous, implacable grace towards the redoubt.

  “This is it,” said Cully. “We have bullets, knives, grenades and a bad attitude, and none of them are going to stop that son of a bitch.”

  “I’ve got an idea,” Dev said. “Something we can try. A last-ditch effort. But Milgrom, you’re not going to like it.”

  “Does it involve you going down there and getting torn apart by pincers?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then I don’t like it. But let’s hear it anyway.”

  “How much weight could your hoverdrone carry?”

  “Don’t know. It’s built for flight, not freight. Maybe a kilo or so.”

  “Cully, any of those high-ex charges left?”

  “A couple. Why? Ohhh. I get it.”

  “Nice,” said Milgrom, nodding approval.

  She summoned her hoverdrone down until it was within arm’s reach. Its spinning rotor fans whirred almost silently, blurry like a hummingbird’s wings.

  “Attach the charges here,” she told Cully, pointing to the machine’s underside.

  Cully complied. The cuboid charges adhered automatically, a surface layer of covalent smart-bond material fusing with the hoverdrone’s graphene-nickel composite casing.

  The hoverdrone arose once more, less agile and more cumbersome in the air now that it was weighed down with a cargo of explosive.

  “Detonators are primed,” Cully said. “Just say when.”

  “Bye-bye, birdie,” said Milgrom as the hoverdrone swooped towards the Ice King.

  “Aim for the mouth,” Dev said.

  “Dunno about ‘aim,’ right now, but sure. Not an eye?”

  “It’s got a spare of those. The mouth’s harder to penetrate, but it’s got to be soft and vulnerable inside, hasn’t it? We’re not going to be able to kill the Ice King this way, but we’re definitely going to be able to show it who’s boss.”

  “Or just piss it off even more,” said Sigursdottir.

  “So we’re off its birthday party list. Who cares? As long as we buy ourselves a little more time.”

  Under Milgrom’s mental guidance, the hoverdrone matched its pace to the Ice King’s.

  “Wait...” said Dev. “Wait ’til it pokes its face out of the water.”

  “What if it doesn’t?” said Cully.

  “Oh, it will,” Dev said, unholstering the hypervelocity pistol.

  He took aim and fired several sabot rounds at the front of the approaching Ice King.

  The monster reared up, as if offended. It raised its pincers aloft, great segmented towers of chitin and muscle.

  Dev fired further rounds directly at its mouth until the HVP’s magazine ran dry.

  Mandibles flared in outrage.

  “Now, Milgrom! Go!”

  The hoverdrone dived clumsily for the exposed opening and bumped into one of the mouth parts. Quick as a flash, the Ice King caught hold of it.

  “Motherfucker!” Milgrom growled.
>
  “Never mind,” said Dev. “That’s close enough. Cully, do it.”

  Cully narrowed her eyes, and the hoverdrone erupted in a blazing ball of flame.

  The explosion evaporated the whole of one mandible, reduced another to shreds, and put cracks in a couple more.

  The Ice King let out that earthquake scream again. It recoiled, lumbering backwards. It pawed at its mouth with a pincer, like a dog with a thorn in its muzzle.

  “Yeah!” Milgrom whooped. “That’s what you get when you mess with the Marines!” She slapped Dev on the back so hard he was briefly winded. “Nice work, fishface. I like your style.”

  “And I like my ribcage all in one piece,” Dev replied, choking.

  “So we’ve delayed the inevitable by a few minutes,” Handler said as the Ice King sank back into the sea. “What now?”

  “A couple of hundred years ago,” Cully said, “this is when people would have started praying, begging God for a miracle.”

  Sigursdottir scanned the horizon. “The Astounding’s the nearest we’re going to get to one – and there’s still no sign of it.”

  “Come on, Ethel,” Dev murmured under his breath. “If you’re going to come through for us, now would be the time.”

  The Ice King didn’t stay under for long. It returned to the redoubt in fury, launching itself headlong at the apartment dome where the humans were holed up – the humans who had caused it so much frustration and suffering. Its mutilated mandibles waved in ghastly, spidery semaphore as it propelled itself out of the water and began clambering up the side of the dome.

  Under its weight the dome began to tilt steeply and sink. Dev, Handler and the Marines fell against the balcony’s parapet. Windows shattered, glass spraying outwards. Items of furniture tumbled through the shard-fringed frames.

  All they could see was the Ice King’s loathsome, disfigured face, rising towards them. Those eyes, burning with hungry malevolence. Those mouth parts, the remaining mandibles now reaching for them...

  63

  AND THEN THE Ice King halted.

  It had them at its mercy; it could have plucked them off the balcony one by one like chocolates from a selection box.

  But it seemed to be having second thoughts.

  As if something had distracted it.

  It shrank back a few metres.

  Then, abruptly, it spun sideways, plunging with purpose towards the sea.

  The dome righted itself, screeching and shuddering, sending Dev and the others rolling backwards across the balcony over a carpet of window fragments. All of them picked up cuts, scrapes and bruises. All of them, nonetheless, were glad – and surprised – to be alive.

  “What just happened?” said Cully.

  Dev hauled himself to his knees and shuffled to the parapet to peer over.

  At first, all he could see was the Ice King thrashing about in the raging sea. The gargantuan crab was turning this way and that and lashing out, as though it had gone mad and was trying to fight the syzygy storm itself.

  Then he spied movement in the water around the monster. There were large shapes flitting to and fro, darting in and out of range, besieging the Ice King.

  “Submarines,” he said. “Tritonian subs.”

  Twenty – thirty – no, fifty or more – he couldn’t keep a count of them – scores of craft – were beleaguering the behemoth from all sides. A host of the living vessels were executing a loosely coordinated campaign of attack.

  They went for the Ice King’s legs, its rear, its underside. Wherever it wasn’t facing, wherever it couldn’t see them, that was where they zipped in.

  They pummelled, stung, bit, rammed, slashed, butted, barged, slapped, each sub using whatever offensive attributes nature had kitted it out with. None made so much as a dent in the Ice King’s thickly armour-plated hide, but it felt them. It felt every blow and nip and thump, and it swivelled, desperate to catch its assailants and punish them.

  The subs retreated every time it spun their way, however, and others seized the opportunity to zoom in and harass the Ice King on its blind side. The Ice King shook its claws and waggled its legs, like it was trying to fend off a swarm of wasps.

  Some it swatted. Its pincer arms, more by luck than judgement, struck several of the subs. Here, there, a fatally injured vessel rolled over and over in agony near the surface, or spiralled limply down out of sight.

  Dev looked for Ethel’s manta. There were a number of ray-like creatures among the attacking horde, and they were too distant and moving too swiftly for him to spot which, if any, had a ruptured cockpit cornea.

  There was a manta, however, which appeared to be bolder and more determined than any of the others. It was setting an example, hammering the Ice King persistently with its wings and withdrawing to safety only at the very last possible moment.

  He decided, with a certainty that was based on gut feeling as much as the evidence of his eyes, that it was Ethel. It had to be – could only be – her.

  “Well, spank me with a paddle and call me Maurice,” said Milgrom, shaking her head in incredulity. “It’s the sea monkey navy, sailing to the rescue. Right in the nick of time.”

  “The what navy?” Dev said.

  “All right, Tritonian. Happy?”

  “Ecstatic.”

  “And that wasn’t an offer, by the way. The spanking-with-a-paddle thing. Don’t be getting ideas.”

  “It never occurred to me that it was, until now. Now I can’t stop getting ideas.”

  “You’d never be so lucky.”

  “‘Lucky’ isn’t the word I’d –”

  – you receiving me? I repeat, this is the Astounding. We’ve patched our comms into an open-channel frequency in this area. We believe it is being used by a team of Marines under the command of Lieutenant Eydís Sigursdottir. If so, please respond.

  “It’s them,” Cully declared. “I don’t believe it. It’s them!”

  Sigursdottir responded:

  Reading you loud and clear. This is Lieutenant Sigursdottir. State your position.

  The voice from the Astounding came back with the news none of them had thought they would live to hear.

  Estimating your location by signal strength, we’re ten minutes out. What is your status?

  Sigursdottir gave a succinct précis of the situation, emphasising that immediate retrieval would be welcome.

  Understood, lieutenant.

  She added:

  We also have your mission objective, right in front of us. Do you have payload prepped and ready to deliver?

  The Astounding replied in the affirmative.

  Sigursdottir said:

  You’re already within range. We can attempt evac unaided, but we have injured. Please advise.

  Silence from the Marine hydrofoil, a silence that spoke of option-weighing and decision-making.

  “Are you really asking them to lob a Sunbaker right at us?” Dev said.

  Sigursdottir shrugged. “It may be their best and only chance. The Ice King’s here, cornered, corralled. Targeting’ll be simple. All they have to do is program the Astounding’s gun to lock in on our signal source and calculate the appropriate firing solution.”

  “Giving us fuck-all time to get to minimum safe distance?”

  “Nobody said soldiering was easy.”

  “And what about the Tritonians? The ones who’ve, let’s not forget, just pulled our fat from the fire? You’re not going to leave them to get incinerated along with the Ice King, surely.”

  “It’s out of my hands.”

  The next voice that came over their commplants was a familiar one.

  Lieutenant Sigursdottir, this is Captain Maddox. I understand you have a visual on this so-called Ice King.

  Sigursdottir confirmed it:

  It’s a couple of hundred metres from our current position. We’ve kept it here as long as we could, in anticipation of your arrival.

  Maddox sounded satisfied:

  Excellent work. Commendable. You realise
I’m faced with a difficult choice, of course. The creature cannot be allowed to continue to roam unchecked. By your own admission, you lost track of it once already. Who’s to say that might not happen again?

  Sigursdottir glanced round at her fellow Marines. Neither Milgrom nor Cully would meet her gaze.

  That’s an affirmative, sir. We realise what you’re saying. We appreciate the candour.

  Again, Maddox sounded satisfied.

  I knew you would. I’m registering Harmer’s commplant ID on this channel.

  I’m here, Maddox. Alive and kicking.

  Delighted to hear it. Sigursdottir’s last report had you missing, whereabouts unknown. Tell me, in your professional opinion as an ISS operative, has there been Polis Plus activity on Triton?

  That’s not really important right now. What’s important is –

  For the record, Harmer. I need to know. Are Polis Plus behind the insurgency? Do you have conclusive proof that the digimentalists have been carrying out covert operations on this planet?

  I wouldn’t call it conclusive, but the balance of probabilities suggests so. The Ice King itself is, I reckon, a Plusser construct, animated by an installed Plusser sentience.

  Would you swear to that?

  I don’t see how it matters. At the moment, the priority is killing the fucking thing.

  I’m going to have to push you. Yes or no?

  All right. Yes. It’s the Plussers. Now listen. Before you let the Sunbaker fly, you have to give me, Handler and your Marines time to clear the area. All I’m asking is five minutes’ grace.