He went in with barely a splash, and swiftly sank.
Dev tossed the pistol in after him.
Handler was breathing hard, almost hyper-ventilating. His eyes were starkly wide, his legs trembling.
“Good work,” Dev reassured him. “Maddox was a scumbag. You’ve done us all a favour.”
“I know, but...”
“Don’t even think about it. It’s over. Great timing, too. I swear he was seconds away from pulling the trigger. I was beginning to worry you weren’t going to make it.”
“No, I was shadowing the pair of you underwater, just like you said. Keeping you in sight. The only problem came when I was climbing out. I was terrified he’d hear me.”
“You were the king of stealth.”
With a sudden horrified shudder Handler tossed the shock lance aside, into the water.
“I never want to do that again.”
“With luck, you’ll never have to.”
“What was it all about, Harmer? The Ice King, Maddox, everything. What have we been up against? What’s it all been in aid of?”
“You’re better off not knowing,” Dev replied, with feeling. “Even I’m not sure what to put in my final report to ISS – what to include, what to leave out. There’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye. I think I’m going to have to be pretty careful what I say to who. As are you.”
Maddox: Powerful interests, some of them much closer to home than you might think.
“If you insist,” Handler said.
“I do. I believe, now, that it wasn’t Maddox who tampered with the growth vat at all. Or if it was, he had inside help.”
“You don’t mean me?”
“Of course not.”
“Someone else in ISS?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s why we need to watch our step.”
“You don’t have to worry about me on that score,” Handler said with finality. “I’m out. I’ve had enough.” He looked at the patch of water where Dev had consigned Maddox’s body. “There’s no coming back from what I’ve just done. I don’t belong in the Diaspora anymore.”
“That’s pretty extreme. What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?”
“After I’ve helped you data ’port out, I’m going to try my luck with the Tritonians. Join one of their communities. If they’ll take me.”
“Really?”
I prefer their honesty, Handler said in Tritonese. Duplicity doesn’t suit me.
You know what? Dev replied. I don’t think that’s the worst decision you could make.
And if I can help keep ungilled–Tritonian relations sweet from their side rather than ours, so much the better.
You’ve found your calling. Good luck with that.
“Meanwhile,” Dev added in normal speech, “we’d better scram, before someone starts wondering where Maddox has got to and comes looking for him.”
Handler nodded, and they both dived.
Ethel was waiting a kilometre away in her manta sub. Then it would be back to Tangaroa and time to data ’port out to wherever Dev was next assigned to visit.
Somewhere dry, he hoped. He’d had enough of being drenched and sodden to last a lifetime.
68
1000000101001001111010 Ninth Extrasolar Engineers 1111100101001100010100100110010100011100101001011
01010111000010101010111111011110001010110111101011111010111101100111111 Leather Hill 11001010101000101
101001 the war against the digimentalists is not over 11100001001011111000011111101111001010 a little closer to your thousand10001010010111001101101110001101111110010101000110101011111001011 Robinson D in the Ophiuchus constellation, also known as Triton 11101111110111111110100101001001010001100
you make a difference00100011101110100010100000111000111101010101110000000000111010001010111001011 powerful interests 1101011100010100011
“And where the fuck am I now?” were the first words out of Dev’s mouth, even before the ache of the data ’porting hangover could set in. “If there’s so much as a puddle on this planet, I am out.”
The response was crisp laughter. Female laughter.
“You couldn’t be anywhere much drier,” the woman said. “PearlTwo.”
“PearlTwo?”
“Gas giant. Owned and run by –”
“The Orb Consortium.” Dev sat up on the mediplinth. Absently, he touched his neck, checking with his fingertips. No gills. Just the solid, unfissured flesh of a Terratypical neck. No webbing between his fingers, either.
Small mercies.
“That’s right. I’m Belinda Tell. Your liaison.”
“Of course you are.”
She was tall, thin, with a face so chiselled and angular it was almost a polygon.
“This is a holiday resort,” Dev said. “I know that much. Playground for the rich and famous, and the wannabe rich and famous. What am I needed here for? We’re nowhere near the Border Wall. The Plussers can’t have a presence. There’s got to have been some mistake. Maybe I got diverted somewhere in ultraspace. I’ve been installed in the wrong host form.”
Belinda Tell shrugged. “You are Dev Harmer, is that correct?”
“As far as I can remember. I feel like I’ve been dozens of different people, dozens of different models, but yes, that’s the chassis number.”
“Then there hasn’t been any mistake. You’re where you’re scheduled to be.”
There was a window. Dev saw clouds – long sunlit streaks of them, in layers both above and below, with a pocket of clear air in between. He detected a faint vibration all around him. He was aboard an airborne vessel, not quite in motion. Hovering. At altitude.
Outside, a man in a wingsuit glided by, fabric stretched taut between his arms and legs, like the wings on a flying squirrel. A third panel between the man’s calves acted as an airfoil, providing extra stabilisation.
A half-dozen other wingsuited people arrowed past, all with broad, exhilarated grins curving beneath their eye goggles.
PearlTwo.
A pleasure planet. Adventure and luxury, in one expensive bundle. Safe thrills galore.
Nothing bad happened in a place like this.
Did it?
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the Facebook brains trust of Marc Francis, Paul Simpson, Jonathan Morgantini and Adam Baker for helping me out with a couple of weapons-tech ideas when I was stumped. On that same score, no thanks at all to Julian Beck, Debbie McMahon, Kit Reed and Stephanie Thorne, who did their best to derail the highly cerebral hive-mind thinking process with frivolous suggestions...
Thanks, too, to Jake Murray for another storming book cover, turning an almost impossible brief into a thing of beauty.
Look out for Book 3, World Of Air,
coming soon...
WORLD OF FIRE!
Dev Harmer, reluctant agent of Interstellar Security Solutions, wakes up in a newly cloned host body on the planet Alighieri, ready for action. An infernal world, so close to its sun that its surface is regularly baked to 1,000°C, hot enough to turn rock to lava. But deep underground there are networks of tunnels connecting colonies of miners who dig for the precious Helium-3.
Polis+, the AI race who are humankind’s great galactic rivals, want to claim the planet’s mineral wealth for their own. All that stands between them and this goal is Dev. But as well as Polis+’s agents, there are giant moleworms to contend with, and a spate of mysterious earthquakes, and the perils of the surface where a man can be burned to cinders if he gets caught unprotected on the day side....
‘One of the SF scene’s most interesting, challenging and adventurous authors.’
Saxon Bullock, SFX Magazine on The Age of Ra
‘Possibly Lovegrove’s best yet... Once again James Lovegrove has subverted and exceeded expectations.’
SF Signal on Age of Shiva
‘5 out of 5. I found myself unable to put it down, and plan to reread it soon.’
Geek Syndicate on Age of Aztec
<
br /> www.solarisbooks.com
‘Lovegrove is vigorously carving out a ‘godpunk’ subgenre – rebellious underdog humans battling an outmoded belief system. Guns help a bit, but the real weapon is free will.’
Pornokitsch
WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY...
AGE OF ANANSI
Dion Yeboah leads an orderly, disciplined life... until the day the spider appears. What looks like an ordinary arachnid turns out to be Anansi, the trickster god of African legend, and its arrival throws Dion’s existence into chaos. He is summoned to America to take part in a contest of trickery. It’s a life-or-death battle of wits, and in the end, only one person will be left standing...
AGE OF SATAN
1968. Guy Lucas is sent to an old-fashioned boarding school, where he is bullied and abused. A fellow student persuades him to perform a black mass and plead with Satan to intervene, with horrific consequences. For the next ten years, the shadow of Satan is cast across his life; he flees, but tragedy follows him. Eventually, he must confront the Devil, and learn the truth about himself...
AGE OF GAIA
Billionaire Barnaby Pollard, energy magnate, has the world at his feet. The planet’s fossil fuel resources are his to exploit, as are the size-zero girlfriends he loves and leaves in endless succession. Until he meets Lydia, a beautiful and opinionated eco-journalist. She’s the very opposite of the kind of woman he normally dates: large and outspoken, with a firm belief that Mother Nature is not to be tampered with...
‘A compulsive, breakneck read by a master of the craft, with stunning action sequences and acute character observations.’
The Guardian on The Age of Zeus
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World of Water Page 32