World of Water Read online

  “Stop beating yourself up over it. We’re alive, aren’t we? And intact.”

  “How did you get away from the thing? How on earth did you manage that?”

  “I’d like to claim I scared it off with my aura of sheer hard-bastard-ness,” said Dev, “but in fact I had help.”

  He explained about catching the thalassoraptor by the tail and about the Tritonians.

  “That was a stroke of good fortune,” Handler said. “They must have been a hunting party. Doubtless there’s a drift cluster – one of their nomadic communities – within a few kilometres of here.”

  “They were tooled up, that’s for sure. And the one who killed the thalassoraptor looked like he knew exactly what he was doing.”

  “They’re a hardy, indomitable bunch, the Tritonians. They live every day surrounded by a thousand different marine species that would like to bite them or sting them or maul them to death, and they’re tough enough to cope. You mess with them at your peril.”

  “I got that impression,” Dev said.

  “They don’t like humans much, either. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d killed you as well.”

  “I got that impression too. Seemed like they were trying to make up their minds about me and finally decided to let me off with a caution. I gave them the old flasheroo.” Dev waved a hand over his face. “But no dice.”

  “It should have worked. That’s why I have that capability.”

  “Yeah, I thought it was worth a shot. You’re some kind of diplomatic envoy, right? In addition to being an ISS liaison.”

  Handler nodded. “That’s my main role here. I’m a go-between, employed to keep Diasporan–Tritonian relations amicable. ISS have me on retainer, but that’s a sideline. Most of the time I’m doing what I can to resolve disputes and convince everyone to play nice. Hence the amphibian adaptations and the subcutaneous photophores.”

  “Photophores?”

  “Light-emitting cells. Tritonians have them, of course. If the two you met didn’t answer back when you ‘spoke’ to them, it’s most likely because they didn’t want to.”

  “I was getting the cold shoulder. The silent treatment.”

  “Just so. It would be fair to say that the Tritonians have no great fondness for us.”

  “Colonists land from outer space and occupy your world without your consent – what’s not to love?”

  “Well, quite. The issues are pretty complex, actually, but there’s always been a general resentment from them towards us, right from the start, and it’s getting worse.”

  “But those two saved me all the same. They could have just left me to become thalassoraptor chow.”

  “Maybe you found a couple of compassionate ones,” said Handler. “How are you doing, anyway?”

  Dev sat up. His clothes were already bone-dry. His headache, however, was returning.

  “I could do with some grub,” he said, “and maybe some more painkillers. Otherwise, I’m fit as a fiddle and raring to go.”

  “Good,” said Handler. “We’re on the clock, remember?”

  “As if I could forget.”

  “And we’ve some travelling ahead of us. Places to go, people to meet.”

  “More Tritonians?”

  “No. Humans.”

  “That’s a relief. Simpler to deal with.”

  “Not these ones.”

  8

  THE RECKLESS ABANDON skimmed across the wavetops at 150 knots.

  Driven by twin thousand-horsepower super-charged turbine impellers, the jetboat went so fast and ploughed such a furrow in the water that the froth didn’t begin to subside until it was over the horizon. To Dev, standing at the aft rail looking back, the boat’s wake was a permanent, indelible white scar.

  Handler was stationed up on the flybridge, keeping an eye on the autopilot. The Reckless Abandon was more or less sailing itself, but he was clearly the sort of person who liked to stay busy and be useful, or at least to make a show of it.

  The journey from Tangaroa to Station Ares, the principal Diasporan military base on Triton, was scheduled to take five hours. Dev whiled some of that time trawling local insites and the ISS central office hub for facts about the planet.

  Triton, it turned out, was one of the less-well-documented places in the known universe, if not the least. There was infinitely more information available about Neptune’s largest moon – also Triton – than there was about the planet. It was eclipsed in significance by its uninhabitable, uncolonised namesake.

  Even its strategic value was downplayed, as though the presence here of Diasporan settlers and troops was a dirty secret, something no one really wanted to mention. Dev found a couple of blogs by radical peace activists campaigning for all humans to be withdrawn from Triton and relocated elsewhere, so as not to tweak the Plussers’ noses. Conversely, there were online interviews with hawkish politicians who demanded that the colonisation of the planet be stepped up, so as to keep the Plussers on their toes.

  Aside from these fairly niche opinions, no one had much to say about it. Triton was in every sense a backwater. Gulf cruisers docked here almost never. The settlers were self-sufficient and left pretty much to their own devices.

  Having done as much astropolitical homework as he was able to, Dev resorted to researching fauna. Triton’s boundless, all-covering ocean hosted an abundance of life, but only a tiny fraction of it could be seen from the deck of a boat. There were gigantic cinnamon-coloured cetaceans that rolled through the depths, breaching the surface just once an hour to breathe. There was the indigo bubble, a type of jellyfish that gathered in such vast numbers during their spawning periods that they formed temporary islands with circumferences of anything up to eight kilometres. There were tentacled squid-like things the size of tree trunks which jetted along just beneath the waves, raiding the sunlight zone for small fry – easy pickings – before returning with their bellies full to the abysses that were their home. Dev peered for them all, but in vain. Not even a glimpse.

  This was not least because the Reckless Abandon made course corrections whenever its sonar picked up larger examples of the creatures, so as to avoid a collision. The jetboat itself was not small – some thirty metres from stem to stern, with a full load displacement of fifty tonnes – but the cetaceans, for instance, dwarfed it. An adult male of the species, which had been dubbed the redback whale, was half as long again as the boat and twice as heavy, and could be very aggressive towards anything he perceived as a competitor trying to horn in on his harem of females. In a contest, the Reckless Abandon would definitely come off worse.

  Soon the sun – Beta Ophiuchi, to give it its proper designation – had begun to set. Two moons glimmered into view overhead as it sank. One was perfectly round, but the other had had a jagged-edged gouge eaten out of it and bore a halo of debris, evidence of some primordial cosmic impact.

  According to one local insite, the two moons could play havoc with Triton’s tides and weather:

  Sometimes, when they’re in close conjunction, their gravity differential fields conspire together and you can get a tidal range of up to ten metres. This is almost invariably accompanied by atmospheric disruption leading to powerful climate events. On the occasions when all three bodies are aligned, Triton and both moons, the phenomenon of the “syzygy storm” is not uncommon. That’s like a Terran hurricane, but magnified by a factor of ten. When one of those sets in you really have to batten down the hatches!

  Dev doubted he would be here long enough to have to worry about any so-called syzygy storm. In just under seventy hours, succeed or fail, he would be zipping through ultraspace to his next host form, since the current one would have broken down catastrophically and be dissolving back into the protoplasmic goo it was conjured out of.

  His mission.

  Earlier, just after they had put out to sea from Tangaroa, Handler had given Dev a mission briefing, sketching out the details.

  In certain regions of the planet, the Tritonians were in open revo
lt. There had been clashes between them and settlers, and some bloodshed.

  At first it had been sporadic, random skirmishes, one here, another there. Sabotage, mostly. A boat hull holed while it was in dock. A fish ranch fence broken. A desalination plant vandalised. A trawler’s net split open at the bottom so that its catch spilled out. Regrettable but understandable, the sort of friction that tended to occur when two very different cultures butted up against each other. The settlers had adopted the sensible tactic of turning a blind eye and waiting for the Tritonians to get bored and give up.

  But the attacks had increased in frequency and ferocity. There had been abductions, and the drowned bodies of the abductees had turned up shortly afterwards, sometimes gruesomely mutilated. A xeno-ichthyologist had vanished while out on a solo specimen-gathering expedition, never to be seen again. The pontoons on a private habitat had been destroyed, causing the whole unit to sink, with the loss of a dozen lives, an entire extended family.

  It was a pattern of escalation and mounting aggression, with the settlers responding in kind. Someone had dropped a homemade depth charge on a Tritonian drift cluster. A posse of scuba-diving humans armed with spearguns had ambushed an indigene hunting party, killing two and badly injuring three others. And those were just the incidents that were public knowledge. There were surely countless others that had never got reported.

  You didn’t need to be a genius to foresee where all this was headed. The mutual hostility would keep on growing, the violence spiralling, until settler and Tritonian were engaged in full-scale, widespread war.

  Was Polis+ responsible for the unrest? Was there a Plusser agitator working behind the scenes, stoking the fires of grievance among the Tritonians, prompting this previously passive race to rise up and fight? Was it all a cunning plot to oust the Diaspora from a world which was too close to their territory for comfort?

  Handler didn’t know, and neither did Dev. Someone in TerCon must think so, though, since ISS had been contracted to send in an operative.

  Dev and Handler’s primary goal was securing a military escort from Station Ares. Then they would need firepower, Handler insisted, and reinforcements. Because they were headed right into the thick of the unrest.

  Dev reflected on the nature of the task ahead. It was the usual mishmash of nebulous intel and impending disaster. He wondered if this was how ISS treated all its operatives, bunging them out into the field to fumble their way to a solution, or if it was a policy they reserved specially for him.

  Probably not. He was nothing special. He had been selected for this particular mission since he was available and in closest proximity, that was all. Luck of the draw. The short straw.

  But then every straw was short when you were an indentured employee of Interstellar Security Solutions.

  Dev was working for the company because he had no choice. Technically he did not exist. He had no body to call his own. He was an itinerant consciousness, a being of pure data that ISS could transmit wherever they liked, wherever they decreed he should go.

  His true body had been all but destroyed on the battlefield during the Frontier War. ISS had promised to build him another one, good as new. The condition was that he would first serve as one of their agents. An entire human body, grown from scratch, was not cheap. He could never normally have afforded one; only the fabulously wealthy could. ISS had offered him the option of earning one.

  All he had to do was hit his quota of a thousand points.

  It was a system of payment by instalments, a scheme based on notional credits which ISS could dole out or take away as they saw fit. Dev was awarded points according to the outcome of his missions. The more resounding the success, the greater the number of points he would receive. Failures and excessive collateral damage incurred deductions.

  Once he hit the magic one thousand mark, his debt to ISS would be discharged. A pristine new body, an exact copy of the original Dev Harmer, would be his. Dev would be free to be himself again – literally.

  Until then, he was just so much space flotsam, fetching up in trouble spots and flashpoints, fighting fires before they could burn out of control.

  Beta Ophiuchi was making its last gasp, melting into the horizon. It was an aged star, past the hydrogen fusion phase of its life, now burning helium to carbon at its core. The name the ancient Arabic astronomers had given it was Cebalrai, meaning ‘sheepdog.’ Dev imagined a tired old hound, worn out from years of hard labour, lapsing into a rickety, arthritic senescence.

  He could empathise.

  Onward the Reckless Abandon went, beating a path through unending sea. Though it was a well-designed vessel, with a plethora of active stabilisation technologies such as gyroscopically-controlled hull fins and self-regulating smartfluid internal anti-roll ballast tanks, the continual sine wave motion of its passage took its toll on Dev. His host form, it seemed, was a swimmer but no sailor; good under the water but not on it. The perpetual nagging headache didn’t help, nor the buzz in his ears that now accompanied it.

  He went below decks, slapped on a seasickness patch from the first aid cabinet, and found a cabin to lie down in. He drifted halfway between sleep and wakefulness until a commplant call from Handler roused him.

  We’re approaching Station Ares. Ten klicks out.

  Be right there.

  “I’ve messaged ahead,” Handler said as Dev scaled the ladder to the flybridge. “They should be expecting us.”

  It was fully dark now. The sonar scope indicated a sizeable bulk, due west. It was getting nearer, but Dev could see nothing through the windscreen except tar-black ocean and a myriad of constellations.

  “Haven’t they heard of lights?” he said.

  “Station Ares is a low-profile structure. No part of it rises more than four metres above sea level. You won’t be able to see it with the naked eye until we’re virtually on top of it.”

  There was a sudden, low whump, like a huge, distant door slamming.

  “What was that?” Handler said.

  Dev knew. He recognised, all too well, the sound of an artillery shell being fired.

  “Get down!” he cried, and when Handler, startled, didn’t budge, he grabbed him in a bearhug and fell with him to the deck.

  The air shrieked.

  The sea exploded.

  9

  THE DETONATION OF the shell, just a few metres off the bow, sent a spray of water over the entire boat. The Reckless Abandon rocked and wallowed crazily.

  Dev, his ears ringing, reached up to the control console and groped for the button to disengage the autopilot, then hauled back on the throttle. The boat slowed.

  “What are you doing?” Handler demanded. “We’ll be dead in the water. A sitting duck.”

  “And if we keep going, they’ll take us for hostiles and hit us.”

  “They’re already trying to hit us.”

  “No, they’re not. If they’d wanted us sunk, we’d be sinking already. That was a warning shot.”

  “So we’re not going to take evasive action?”

  “No. You’re going to boot up your commplant and tell whoever’s in charge here that we’re ISS and we come in peace.”

  The fog of panic on Handler’s face cleared. Unlike Dev, he had never come under fire before. It was a new and terrifying experience for him. Dev’s words cut through the fear.

  “Yes. All right. Of course.”

  His eyes lost focus as he accessed his commplant. Dev, meanwhile, scanned ahead, looking out for the telltale flash of a shell exiting a barrel. He hoped he was right about the warning shot. If not, then by now the artillery piece’s targeting guidance system would have a solid fix on the boat. The first shell might have been a near-miss. The next would be a dead cert.

  “Through yet?”

  Handler shook his head. “Connections are slow on Triton. We have about half the number of communications relay satellites a planet this size needs.” He raised a finger. “Hold on. I think I’m... Yes.”

  There followed
a conversation between Handler and someone at Station Ares which Dev was not privy to. His only clue to its content was Handler’s face, which ran the gamut of expressions from anxious to indignant to relieved. At the end of it, the ISS liaison looked up and gave a broad smile.

  “Phew,” he said.

  “I like ‘phew.’”

  “It was all a misunderstanding, apparently.”

  “That was a misunderstanding? I’d hate to see what they do when they’re really confused.”

  “The base is on high alert. Someone on watch got over-keen. We’re safe to go in and dock now.”

  Handler piloted the boat cautiously for the remaining few kilometres, sticking to a gentle, unthreatening speed. Eventually, Station Ares came into view, a long, low block of blackness studded with lights. As the Reckless Abandon drew closer, Dev got an impression of its shape: a hexagonal axis with six radial arms, each subdividing into branches and tipped with a field gun.

  A standard pop-up offshore naval base, the kind which could be airdropped in kit form and assembled on site in under a week and which was known colloquially as a ‘snowflake.’ Depending on requirements, it could be configured to provide dockage for a flotilla of medium-sized warships or accommodation for as many as eight companies of Marines.

  Station Ares appeared to have plumped for the half-and-half option, its facilities equally divided between dorms and marinas. Dev counted a dozen ships in all, from corvettes to nippy little fast-attack craft. All sported the chiselled, angular design that minimised radar cross-section almost to zero.

  A gunboat had been launched to greet the Reckless Abandon, stabbing the darkness with a searchlight.

  “Ahoy, there,” said an amplified voice. “Follow us in.”

  The gunboat spun about, and Handler trailed obediently after it.

  They moored and disembarked, to be met by a welcoming committee of three Marines. The highest-ranking was First Lieutenant Sigursdottir, who snapped them a salute that was crisp, curt and, because they were civilians, just that little bit contemptuous.