World of Water Read online

  The behemoth was flat and round, like a discus. Dev could just make out segmented limbs, principally two great arms tipped with pincers. Oar-shaped legs at the rear rowed it to and fro, while an array of thinner, more delicate legs kept it balanced in the water.

  If it resembled anything, it was a crab. But he didn’t think that was what Ethel was getting at. She meant something else, something she evidently felt he would find familiar.

  A moment later, he had it.

  It could only be the symbol the insurgents had left on the Egersund’s forecastle, the one he had made a sketch of and later shown to Ethel, prompting a tirade of disgust and anger from her.

  What he had taken for sky, moons and lightning forks – or directional arrows – were actually the carapace, eyes and forelimbs of a crab.

  This very crab.

  He was looking at a myth made real. A story in the flesh. A god incarnate.

  He was looking at the Ice King.

  42

  THE ICE KING was foraging, plucking at objects that floated on the surface and stuffing them into its maw with its pincers.

  As the manta sub inched closer, Dev tried to make out what it was feasting on. He had a pretty good idea, and the thought turned his stomach. But he needed to be sure.

  Gathered around the gargantuan crab were smaller beasts, an entourage of Tritonian subs, dwarfed by the monstrosity they attended. Ice King worshippers, congregating around their deity.

  Beyond them lay Opochtli. Even from below, Dev could tell that the township had been attacked already and now lay in ruins. Flames glittered above the sea’s surface, distorted and refracted by the tempestuous waves. Beneath, debris was tumbling, twirling languidly, a slow-motion snowfall of rubble spiralling down into the dark depths.

  The Ice King continued reaping the spoils of the havoc it had caused. It was taking its pick from the bodies floating round Opochtli, scavenging just like any ordinary crab, eating greedily.

  Some of its prey weren’t even dead yet, settlers who had hurled themselves into the sea to escape the destruction of their home, only to find that swimming away could not save them. The Ice King fastened pincers around them and drew them down, writhing helplessly, into its mouth, where its mandibles sawed the bodies into swallowable morsels.

  What do we do? Ethel asked, appalled. How do we fight... that?

  Not with a couple of manta subs, that’s for sure, Dev replied. I’m going to head up to the Marines, see if they’ve got anything on board to tackle it with.

  Even as he swam from the manta sub’s mouth to the surface, however, Dev doubted the Admiral Winterbrook had the capability to do any significant damage to the Ice King. The crustacean’s shell looked to be several metres thick all over. That much chitin would be as effective a protection as the ablative plating safeguarding gulf cruisers against meteor strikes and collision damage. A torpedo or depth charge might chip away at the top layer, but would never penetrate deep enough to cause fatal harm.

  He hailed the catamaran via commplant as he broke surface, and shortly after was aboard and on the bridge. There he joined Sigursdottir, Handler, Milgrom and Jiang.

  “Perhaps if we aimed for a weak spot, we could at least give it something to think about,” Jiang said, after Dev had described the Ice King to them. What she lacked in stature, she made up for in steely focus. “Maybe even cripple it.”

  “I don’t think it has a weak spot,” said Dev.

  “Limb joint? Mouth? Eye?”

  “Possibly, but you haven’t see this thing. Not with your own eyes. It’s a fucking beast. Like something out of an old Toho Studios movie.”

  “I have to admit we thought we had a sonar malfunction when it first popped up on the scope,” said Sigursdottir. “And before you ask, I know there are survivors out there. We’ve spotted one or two, at any rate. We’ve seen them get dragged under. We’d go in and try to pick up as many as we can, but...”

  “But,” said Jiang, “the sheer amount of water that thing’s displacing, coupled with the treacherous conditions, makes it impossible. We’d be swamped if we tried. It wouldn’t be a rescue mission so much as a suicide run.”

  “It sucks balls,” said Milgrom, tight-lipped, “but you have to weigh up the risk-to-reward ratio. All we can do is figure out some way to make that motherfucking monster pay for what it’s done.”

  “It’s the actual Ice King?” said Handler to Dev. “You’re quite convinced about that?”

  “Ethel reckons as much, and if she does, then so do I. I’m not saying it’s genuinely a god, of course not. But it seems like someone’s managed to build a creature that’s big enough and powerful enough to pass for a god. And by ‘someone’ I obviously mean Polis Plus.”

  “How? Engineered it?”

  “Why not? You should have seen some of the Frankenstein abortions the Plussers dreamed up and threw at us during the war. Nothing as humungous as this, but still hideous enough to give you nightmares.”

  The pack of marauding caniforms on Epsilon Indi A sprang to mind, as did the troll-like commando things on 55 Cancri D. Dev would never forget them. He had led a dozen-strong team of sappers into the cave system where the creatures hid between their night-time harrying raids on Diasporan farmsteads, with a view to planting munitions and bringing the roof down on their bulbous, misshapen heads. The op was a success, but not casualty-free. The trolls – pallid, agile, spidery-limbed, needle-fanged – kept slipping silently out of crevices to tear out throats or twist necks.

  The organic host forms the Plussers created were somehow worse than the inorganic. Their carbon-and-tungsten mechs were at least logical in design, sleek, cunningly modular, sometimes even possessing a lethal beauty. Polis+ had less affinity with flesh, and what their minds conceived often betrayed that. They had no sense of how evolution shaped and refined an organism, the symmetry of it, what went with what. They just threw attributes together, gene-splicing indiscriminately, hitching the properties of one species to the properties of another any old how. Whatever worked. Whatever fulfilled the intended function.

  The results were seldom short of ghastly.

  The Ice King, if nothing else, was pure arthropod, a recognisable entity – just magnified to colossal proportions, to besiege townships and singlehandedly reduce them to rubble. It was ugly even by crab standards, but the true horror of it was its phenomenal, mind-boggling size.

  “Never mind who made it or how,” said Milgrom. “How do we end it? That’s the question here.”

  “The Winterbrook doesn’t have the firepower, I know that,” said Jiang, more than a little ruefully. It pained her to admit that her boat’s armaments weren’t up to the task. “A vessel like this is meant for littoral work, mostly – landings, inshore river assaults, engagements in shallow water. It can take on a gunboat, say, but not a battlecruiser. And it’d be safe to describe that thing down there as sitting at the battlecruiser end of spectrum.”

  “A nuke would sort it out,” said Sigursdottir.

  “Do you have any?” said Dev. “Like maybe a satellite-launched ICBM we could call down?”

  Sigursdottir shook her head. “None. The only satellites orbiting Triton are communications-relay ones.”

  “And spy-in-the-sky ones, trained on Polis Plus territory.”

  “You know about those?”

  “Captain Maddox told me, although I’d already guessed. Station Ares is forward reconnaissance.”

  “Yes, and it’s safe to say that Polis Plus know it too. It’d be stupid of us to sit here, perched right on the Border Wall, and not be taking a peek over at their comings and goings. But as long as we’re only looking, and they know we’re only looking, and we know they know, and that’s as far as it goes...” She smiled thinly. “Détente, right? Everyone’s happy.”

  “So I suppose kinetic-rod bombardment is out, for the same reason.”

  “Yup. Anything floating up there in orbit that even smelled like a weapon would have the Mainframe Council screaming
peace treaty infringement. It’d be too overt, too much in their faces. The Plussers just couldn’t turn a blind eye to that.”

  “But you have nuclear bombs at Station Ares. Please tell me you do.”

  “No.”

  “Shit.”

  “We’ve got something better. A couple of Sunbakers.”

  Sunbakers were fusion warheads which, in the microsecond before impact, fired a burst of high-energy x-rays at a hydrogen fuel pellet suspended inside a gold-plated hohlraum shell. The result was an explosion which, for the brief duration of its existence, rivalled a main sequence star for temperature and intensity.

  “Kept under lock and key,” said Sigursdottir, “in case of need.”

  “Independently propelled?”

  “No. Ship-mounted artillery shells.”

  “But Maddox could get them here...”

  “And will,” Sigursdottir said resolutely, with finality. “Once I give him a full sitrep, he’ll order them to be broken out and deployed.”

  “You’ll have to impress on him that they’re the only thing that’s even got a chance of killing the Ice King.”

  “Don’t worry, I will.”

  “But it’s going to take half a day to get the Sunbakers here,” said Jiang. “What happens in the interim?”

  “What do you mean?” said Dev.

  “Well, we can’t just let the Ice King roam free, can we? There are other townships in the vicinity. Mazu’s the obvious next target.”

  “It’s being evacuated,” said Sigursdottir. “Should be cleared by now.”

  “Even so, the Ice King can still clobber it and leave several thousand people without homes and livelihoods, racking up several millions’ worth of property damage into the bargain. And I can name at least two other settlements – not as big as any of the Triangle Towns, but still juicy targets – within a hundred-click radius.”

  “We have to keep the über-crab occupied, is that what you’re saying?” said Milgrom.

  “No, but keep tabs on it and be ready to wade in if it looks like it’s getting set to stomp somewhere else.”

  “Gunnery Sergeant Jiang,” said Dev, “you’ve taken the words right out of my mouth. Until the Sunbakers arrive, the Ice King is our responsibility. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed and hope Crabzilla’s had its fill of killing for now.”

  43

  “YOU’RE AVOIDING ME.”

  Dev was steadying himself on the rail of the Admiral Winterbrook, preparing to dive overboard and re-join Ethel. Handler had followed him out from the bridge onto deck, hurrying to catch up.

  “No, I’m not,” Dev said. “What gives you that idea?”

  “The way you rushed out just now. I was trying to attract your attention.”

  “Didn’t see. Sorry.”

  Handler looked at him sceptically, as well he might, since Dev had indeed ignored the ISS liaison’s obvious hand-flapping attempts to catch his eye, and hadn’t made much of a pretence about it either.

  “Well, you’re due your latest nucleotide shot. If you’ll wait a minute, I can fetch one.”

  “Yeah, about that. I’m going to do without from now on.”

  “What? That’s crazy.”

  “Might be.” On reflex, Dev checked the countdown timer:

  30:12:11

  “I’m just wondering if the cure isn’t worse than the disease.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Handler snapped. “Of course it isn’t. The serum patches are all that’s standing between your host form and catastrophic collapse. Without them, I tell you, you’ll start dissolving into pure foaming protoplasm. Do you want that?”

  “Fun as it sounds, no, I don’t.”

  “It’d be an accelerating cascade. Within two hours, three at most, your body will begin falling apart. And once the process is under way, once the ball gets rolling, there’s nothing you or I or anyone can do to stop it. My guess is it’ll take an hour all told. An hour of screaming, haemorrhaging agony. Everything that’s inside you, pouring out in a great gush.”

  “You paint such a vivid picture. Still, I’m going to pass.”

  Handler clutched the air despairingly. “Why? We’re a good half-day’s journey away from Tangaroa and the transcription matrix. If you want to data ’port out safely, you’d have to start heading back now, and even then there’s no guarantee you’d make it in time. Come on,” he cajoled, “have the next shot. It’ll only take a moment.”

  “You want the honest truth, Handler?” Dev said. “I’ve come to the conclusion that your precious nucleotides aren’t making any difference. No, scratch that. They are making a difference. Just not a positive one.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Easily. You may not have noticed, but every time you stick one of those patches on me, not long afterwards I get sick. Something nasty happens like a rash, or spasms of pain, or bleeding.”

  “Coincidence,” Handler said with a dismissive flick of the wrist. “Or it could simply be that your immune system is abreacting. It doesn’t recognise the nucleotides as helpful. It’s mistaking them for a virus or bacteria – an enemy.”

  “I’m no medic, but that sounds unlikely.”

  “I’m no medic either. All I know is I’m trying to keep you alive and well for as long as I possibly can, so that you can complete your mission, and you for some inexplicable reason are rejecting my help. Besides, you’re wrong.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes. You got sick before I even put a patch on you. Remember? Almost as soon as you came round after being installed, you complained of a severe headache. Like your skull was, and I quote, ‘full of lava.’”

  Dev couldn’t deny it. “Installation’s never pleasant.”

  “You said you felt much worse than usual.”

  “Maybe the half of me that’s human is allergic to the half of me that’s fish.”

  “Facetiousness is often what people resort to when they know they’re losing the argument.”

  “And condescension is often what people resort to when they know they haven’t got a hope of winning the argument. Look, Handler, I really don’t have time for butting heads like this. The biggest fucking crab in the universe ever is going on a rampage, accompanied by a horde of religious nutcases who are under the impression it’s their god and it’s come to save them. Our job is to turn it into seafood chowder. That’s my priority right now.”

  “But you’ll never succeed if your host form gives out on you.”

  “I’m gambling on surviving long enough to pull it off.”

  “Without nucleotides? Not a chance. I insist you take the next dose.”

  Dev climbed onto the deck rail, swaying as a particularly heavy wave hoisted the Admiral Winterbrook onto its back and then, as if changing its mind, set the boat down again the other side.

  Handler laid a firm hand on his shoulder.

  “I’d let go if I were you,” Dev said in a low voice.

  “As your ISS liaison,” Handler said, “I demand that you do as I ask.”

  “Take your hand off me or I’ll break it.”

  “You wouldn’t dare. Think how our employers would view that. Think of your one-thousand-point quota. How many points would ISS deduct for maliciously injuring a co-worker? I don’t know the answer myself, but I suspect it’s quite a few.”

  “Might be worth it, just to wipe that patronising smirk off your face.”

  “Harmer, please.” Handler’s tone became wheedling, conciliatory. “This antagonism – it’s unnecessary and counterproductive. I’m on your side. I’m trying to do what’s best for everyone.”

  Dev gave an exaggerated, emphatic shrug. Handler got the message and, to appease him, lifted his hand away.

  “Just come inside with me,” he continued. “Lieutenant Sigursdottir let me stash the case of patches in her cabin. I went to all that trouble, retrieving it before the Reckless Abandon went down. You wouldn’t want me to have done that for nothing, would you?”

 
“All right then,” Dev relented with a sigh. “You lead the way. I’ll be right behind.”

  Handler, satisfied, turned away from him.

  Next instant, Dev scrambled over the rail and propelled himself into the heaving sea. Handler’s yell of thwarted exasperation was cut off as Dev hit the water.

  He half expected Handler to dive in after him and carry on the discussion in Tritonese. Evidently, though, the ISS liaison felt the point – and Dev – didn’t merit pursuing.

  There was only the tiniest niggle of doubt in Dev’s mind that he was right about the nucleotide shots. They were making things worse for him. It was simple cause-and-effect. Symptoms of cellular breakdown cropped up almost immediately after each dose.

  So, was the treatment unsuitable? Had Handler been given bad advice by ISS?

  Or was the batch of nucleotide serum contaminated somehow?

  Both were possibilities, and both were unpalatable.

  But there was a third, even worse possibility.

  Sabotage.

  44

  THE ICE KING was moving on.

  With its retinue of Tritonian subs, the God Beneath the Sea – now, more accurately, the God In the Sea – left Opochtli behind. Its physical appetite had been sated. Perhaps its appetite for destruction too. For the time being, anyway.

  Mighty, water-warping kicks of its paddle-like hind legs drove it away from the township, setting up a turbulence that turned the sinking debris into a raging blizzard.

  The manta subs took refuge in deeper strata of the ocean as the chunks of flotsam hurtled past like meteors. They stayed there until things calmed.

  The Ice King had been unaware of the subs’ presence, or of that of the Admiral Winterbrook. It had been preoccupied. Its assembled worshippers hadn’t spotted them either, too busy gawking at their god’s awe-inspiring display of power to look in any other direction.

  This, Dev mused, was just about the only advantage he and his allies had going for them. They had observed the Ice King from a safe range and managed to remain unobserved themselves.