World of Water Page 25

  Oh, we do, said Dev.

  Then you can count me in. I want to be there when it dies. Witness it with my own eyes, up close.

  Trust me, you don’t want to be too close. The weapon we’ll be using – let’s just say the results are best seen from a distance. A considerable distance.

  Fair enough.

  What I still can’t work out is why the Ice King went for that drift cluster.

  That puzzles me too. It seems so arbitrary. If it were just an animal, I might understand. But you claim it’s being controlled from the inside.

  The drift cluster wasn’t by any chance a Nautilus Movement stronghold? Dev hazarded.

  Not to my knowledge, no. But even if it was, the Ice King didn’t seem to care if innocent bystanders got hurt. Children, for example.

  Well, if what it did has cured a few insurgents of their religious fever, that’s something, Dev said. Now all we have to do is eradicate the source of the disease. The Ice King’s second coming is about to be cut short.

  And good riddance, the kid said, with feeling.

  Ethel looked at him with surprise – and something that bore a more than passing resemblance to approval.

  53

  MAZU.

  Last surviving Triangle Town.

  Its domes and outlying marinas and algae farms rode the enormous sea swell. Each roller sent a ripple through it, making its various sections rise and fall in succession, from one end to the other. The bridges that linked them all canted up and down, hinges strained to the limit. The entire township resembled a caterpillar, flexing fluidly.

  The storm was doing its level best to break Mazu apart, but so far the place was holding together.

  Once the Ice King got here, that would all change.

  It seemed that the manta sub, although it had travelled at less than maximum speed, had made good time. The Admiral Winterbrook was already on the scene, but of the Ice King there was no sign. Both vessels had beaten it to its destination.

  Dev transferred from the sub to the catamaran, where the first thing he did was head for the bridge and brief Sigursdottir about the attack on the drift cluster and the ensuing game of cat and mouse which had led to him and Ethel hiding out in the deepest possible reaches of the ocean. Jiang, at the helm, listened in, and Milgrom entered shortly before he finished and caught the tail end of his summary.

  “You’ve had yourself a morning,” Sigursdottir remarked.

  “You can say that again.”

  “Don’t mistake this frown on my face for sympathy, though. I’m not happy. Thanks to you, we lost track of the Ice King.”

  “Temporarily.”

  “Yeah, we lucked out. Picked it up again. But I thought the whole big idea was to keep tabs on it. That’s what we agreed on.”

  “Ethel kind of scuppered that. Like I said, it killed a couple of her friends and she knew we’d be next if she didn’t do something drastic. She was also trying to help the people from the drift cluster. They might well have been next on the Ice King’s hit list.”

  “Very noble.”

  “Nice piece of buck-passing there,” said Milgrom, unwrapping a protein bar and taking a big bite. “Blame the sea monkey.”

  “No,” said Dev. “I take full responsibility. For everything. But corporal, for what it’s worth, I’d be obliged if you didn’t call her a sea monkey.”

  “Ahh, you’re sweet on the fish lady. That’s nice. You two going to spawn together, huh? Make thousands of nice little caviar babies?”

  Dev was tired, irritable and hungry, and the sight of Milgrom munching on food, when his own energy levels were low and his stomach was growling, was pretty much the final straw. Insults and banter he could handle, but it felt as though she was eating in front of him solely in order to mock him.

  “Go fuck yourself,” he said.

  “Only way I can guarantee myself a decent lay,” Milgrom shot back with a smirk and carried on gnawing on the bar. “So, you must really like the taste of fish.”

  “Seriously, shut up or I will shut you up.”

  “You’re not man enough.”

  “With all due respect, screw you.”

  Milgrom took a step towards him. “‘Screw you’ I can take. But anyone who with-all-due-respects me deserves a pasting.”

  Dev’s hands balled into fists. It was neither the time nor the place to get into a scrap, but Milgrom was really rubbing him up the wrong way. A joke was a joke, but Ethel didn’t deserve the disrespect she was getting.

  And that protein bar looked so delicious, too.

  Sigursdottir moved between them as they eyeballed each other. “You two need to either have a punch-up or get a room. I can’t make up my mind which. But at this precise instant, you are both going to stand down and back off. The Ice King is still inbound and we have to decide on the best course of action. Gunnery Sergeant Jiang, how far away is it?”

  Jiang checked the sonar screen. “Four klicks and closing. Not going too quickly. Looks kind of arrogant to me. Taking its time, like it knows Mazu’s a sitting duck.”

  “I don’t need your interpretation of the thing’s psychology,” Sigursdottir snapped. She was under immense strain and trying, not wholly successfully, to keep it from showing. “Just the facts. How soon ’til contact?”

  “Ten minutes tops.”

  “Okay. I say we pull back to a safe distance. Let this play out as it will. There’s nothing we can do to stop Mazu getting clobbered. It’s strictly observe-and-report for us. Then, once the Ice King moves on, we resume pursuit duties until such time as the Sunbakers show up.”

  “Which’ll be when?” Dev asked, shooting a surly glance at Milgrom, who shuttered her eyes at him sneeringly.

  “They’re on their way aboard the Astounding. That’s a combat hydrofoil, fastest boat Station Ares has. Maddox is captaining it himself.”

  “We’re honoured.”

  “High priority. Also, nobody but himself has clearance to launch a Sunbaker. Current ETA is...” Sigursdottir looked to Jiang.

  “Oh-four-hundred hours,” said Jiang. “A little under five hours from now. Could be longer, though. They’re going at flank speed, but they’ll lose headway if the storm gets any worse.”

  “It could get worse?” said Dev, only half facetiously. The Admiral Winterbrook was seesawing from stem to stern and shuddering violently with every wave that crashed over its bows. The world outside was one mass of angry water, from the sea itself to the pelting rain.

  “Syzygy storm,” said Milgrom. “Not for wimps.”

  “Yes, it could get worse,” Sigursdottir said. “Winds haven’t yet topped hurricane force, and the meteorological satellites are predicting they might. Seventy per cent probability.”

  “Wishing I hadn’t asked now,” Dev said. “All right, so we’re sacrificing Mazu to Crab Features. Shame, but as a wise man once said, ‘Sometimes you have to lose a town to gain a planet.’”

  “Who said that?” Milgrom challenged. “I’ve never heard that before.”

  “Actually I made it up. But it still applies. Now, just out of curiosity, where’s Handler?”

  “Last I saw of him,” said Sigursdottir, “he went off to bunk down in one of the communal cabins.”

  “He’s been keeping a low profile,” said Milgrom. “Think all the excitement’s been getting too much for him, poor lamb.”

  “Just head down and aft,” said Sigursdottir. “You’ll find him. Don’t be long, though, or you’ll miss the show.”

  “I only want a word or two,” Dev said.

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “Hopefully it won’t have to be.”

  54

  “DOWN AND AFT” meant negotiating a narrow companionway down from the bridge to an even narrower corridor on the lower deck. The staircase underfoot pitched and yawed as the boat rocked.

  The first cabin door Dev tried, he disturbed Reyes and Cully, the diving team, catching some shuteye in bunks fitted with form-hugging intellifoam mattresse
s. Reyes had some very uncomplimentary things to say about him intruding on their slumber after they’d been up half the night on watch duty, and Dev backed out with an apology.

  The second door he tried, the bunks were empty, but Blunt and Francis were on the floor, lying on their sides in sixty-nine position. They were going at it hammer and tongs, clothing askew, eyes shut, heads pecking, tongues flicking, so into each other that they didn’t even register Dev’s presence. All that talk about the handsome Master Chief Reynolds earlier, he mused as he glided the door shut. Private Blunt and Private Francis were wherever-you-can-take-it women, it seemed. Any port in a storm.

  Third door, paydirt. Handler occupied a berth above Private Fakhouri, the comms specialist. She was lying on her back, arms folded behind her head, with the coma stare of someone watching or listening to entertainment.

  Handler, by contrast, was in a semi-doze, and was startled – to say the least – when Dev grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out of the bunk and into the corridor.

  “What the – ? Who the – ? What – ?” he spluttered. “Harmer! What are you doing? What is this?”

  Dev slammed him against the wall, forearm to throat, pinning him in place.

  “No time for niceties,” he said. “Straightforward question. Give me a straightforward answer, and maybe this’ll go okay. The nucleotide shots. What are they really?”

  “I don’t know what you’re –”

  “Wrong! You had your chance, blew it. Now we do this the hard way.”

  “Harmer, have you gone mad? Help! Someone help!”

  Fakhouri emerged from the cabin just as Dev was about to frogmarch Handler off down the corridor.

  “Hold on,” she said. “What’s all the fuss? Where are you taking him?”

  “ISS business, Private Fakhouri,” Dev said. “This is between me and Handler. Nothing to concern you.”

  “Harmer’s assaulting me,” Handler remonstrated. “For no reason whatsoever.”

  “No reason?” said Dev. “All right then. How about this? Do you believe in a supreme being?”

  “What?”

  “Do you believe in an afterlife? Do you live comforted by the falsehood that, when you pass on, your soul becomes subsumed into the Singularity?”

  “Where is all this coming from?”

  “How does it make you feel when I tell you that on Earth, during the Enlightenment, we began to treat religious fundamentalism as a mental illness?”

  Handler blinked in disbelief. “You have got to be joking. You’re using the Provocation Sequence test questions on me? You’re trying to out me as a Plusser? Me?”

  “How does it make you feel,” Dev persisted, “when I deny your fantasy god? Does it make you angry? Does it offend you down to your so-called soul?”

  “Look into my eyes,” Handler said. “Look deep. Are these the eyes of a Plusser? Do you see Uncanny Valley in them?”

  “Hard to tell, with those extra lids.”

  “The extra lids don’t make any difference.” The ISS liaison let out a high-pitched laugh with a touch of hysteria in it. “I can’t believe you honestly suspect me of being a digimentalist in disguise. How ridiculous.”

  “Well, if you aren’t Polis Plus, maybe you’re working for them without knowing it.”

  “Hypnagogic exposure, you mean? They’ve brainwashed me into doing their bidding? You’re really reaching now, Harmer. Can this get any more absurd? Next you’ll be claiming I’m collaborating with the insurgency.”

  “Had crossed my mind.”

  “What’s brought on all these accusations? The serum, yes? Because you think it’s made you unwell? We’ve been over that. You were unwell when you started.”

  “What if that’s because you gave me one of those shots before I came round on the mediplinth?” Dev said.

  Handler tried to dismiss the suggestion with a sigh, as though he had never in his life heard something so implausible.

  But there was a fraction of a second’s delay before the sigh came out. The tiniest of hesitations.

  Bingo.

  Dev knew, then and there, that he had hit the nail on the head.

  “How would I ever know?” he went on. “Why would I suspect? There’d be no evidence. The microneedle patches don’t leave a mark on the skin. Not a trace to show that you’d already pumped me with a few millilitres of whatever it is that’s been fucking my host form up.”

  “Wild speculation.”

  Dev shoved Handler against the wall again. “Then how come I haven’t felt better since coming to Triton than I do now, hours since my last dose?”

  “If you ask me,” Handler said in slightly strangulated tones, because Dev’s forearm was once more pressing on his windpipe, “the irrational behaviour you’re exhibiting is precisely because you haven’t been keeping up with the nucleotide shots. Your brain is starting to go. Could be there’s some intracranial bleeding you’re unaware of. It’s affecting your cognitive processes, making you think that insane things are true.”

  Briefly, for a fleeting instant, Dev felt that what Handler was saying was possible. It made a kind of sense. All of this – his suspicions about Handler, the aggression he was feeling towards him, the way he’d let Milgrom get under his skin a short while earlier – was just the newest manifestation of his host form’s gradual decline. His mind was growing unstable, a kind of dementia setting in. What if the final, irreversible breakdown of his body had started? His brain could be turning to Swiss cheese inside his skull, driving him to madness, and he simply didn’t realise.

  No.

  “No,” he said. “Nice try, though. You almost had me. Now come on.” He yanked Handler away from the wall. “I know just how to get you to talk, and you won’t be able to lie.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. We can prove it either way by getting you outside and underwater. We speak in Tritonese, and there’s no way you can pull any shit on me. Tritonians always tell the truth, remember? They can’t help themselves.”

  Handler let out a bleat of protest, and at the same time Fakhouri drew her sidearm – standard Marine-issue polymer-frame 9mm automatic, with a magazine full of self-steering fragmentation rounds and a DNA-coded grip to prevent it being wielded by anyone except the rightful user. She aimed it at Dev.

  “Stop,” she said. “I’m not completely clear what’s going on here, but you, Harmer, are threatening that man, and I can’t let you do that. Not on a Marine boat, under Marine command.”

  “Fakhouri, please,” said Dev, “put the gun away. I appreciate you think you’re doing the right thing. You’re not.”

  Reyes and Cully were now out in the corridor too, drawn by the ruckus. Cully’s hand stole towards her own sidearm, while Reyes positioned herself beside Fakhouri’s shoulder, a gesture of solidarity and support. She had her colleague’s back.

  “He fully intends to hurt me,” Handler said. “You’ve seen him. The man’s a loose cannon. You need to pacify him.”

  “And you,” said Dev, “are a treacherous sack of shit who’s been undermining my mission from the very beginning, and I’m going to find out why.”

  “Treacherous sack of – !”

  “And conniving. Tell them, Handler, how you’ve been spying on us on Captain Maddox’s behalf.”

  “Spying on ‘us,’ Harmer? Spying on you, maybe. Why would Maddox ask me to keep an eye on his own troops? Especially when he’s in regular contact with Lieutenant Sigursdottir.”

  “An ISS liaison in cahoots with a senior military officer – that’s not standard operating procedure.”

  “We’re not in cahoots,” said Handler. “I’ve just been acting as an extra pair of eyes for him. In fact, you might say, thanks to my association with Maddox, that I could be considered an honorary Marine.”

  It was a blatant attempt to appeal to Fakhouri, Reyes and Cully and, to Dev’s dismay, it worked.

  “You should let him go,” Reyes said to Dev. “
I’m sure we can sort it all out like mature adults, without anybody hitting anybody.”

  “Yeah,” said Cully. “You seem like a good guy, Harmer. I think we’re all a bit overwrought. If you’d just calm down...”

  “Handler said Harmer might have something wrong with his brain,” said Fakhouri. “Something about medicine he has or hasn’t been taking, if I’ve been following the conversation correctly.”

  “Medicine?” said Cully.

  “That’s just a bluff,” Dev said. “Handler’s trying to do a number on me. And on you.”

  “Your word against his,” said Reyes.

  “Why don’t I put this hypervelocity pistol against his head?” Dev said, nodding down at his own hip. “Then we’ll see whose word we can rely on.”

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Fakhouri, sighting down the gun barrel at Dev and tightening her index finger to achieve first pressure on the trigger. Her legs were braced apart, knees softened to absorb the rocking motion of the catamaran and keep her upper body steady. The expert stance of someone trained to use a firearm on a boat in high seas. “You’re going to let go of him, and then we’re going to walk up to the bridge, nice and slow, and we’re going to talk things through in front of Lieutenant Sigursdottir in a civilised manner, and that way nobody gets a dirty great hole in them.”

  Dev weighed up the options: trying to disarm Fakhouri, going for his own gun, swinging Handler round to use as a human shield, or simply surrendering. None of them seemed particularly beneficial or appealing.

  He very much didn’t want to get into a shooting match with the Marines. He would in all likelihood come off worst, since he didn’t have a drawn weapon and Fakhouri did. Plus, there were three of them and only one of him. More to the point, they were all supposed to be on the same side.

  He didn’t want to surrender either, because then he would have lost control of the situation, for the time being at least. Who knew when he would get another crack at Handler? The ISS liaison was aware that Dev was wise to him now and wouldn’t let himself be collared so easily again. He might even beg protection from Sigursdottir, so that Dev would find it difficult getting another chance to interrogate him.