World of Water Page 6

  Yeah, but nobody’s whaling anymore on Earth. Seems unfashionable these days. Uncool.

  Whereas here, halfway across the galaxy, it’s still okay.

  What the eye doesn’t see...

  The two boats rounded the rear of the Egersund and completed their circuit of the ship. Other than the redback carcass, there had been no sign of life – or death. The Egersund appeared to have been abandoned while its crew were midway through gathering in their latest catch.

  So what’s the plan, Sigursdottir?

  We’re going to have to send men aboard. There may still be crewmembers somewhere, perhaps injured, unable to communicate. We can’t leave without checking.

  Okay. I’ll come with.

  What? Why?

  Curiosity. I’m in intel-collecting mode. What’s happened on that ship may be relevant to my mission. It may not be, but I won’t know unless I take a look for myself.

  I’m under orders from Captain Maddox to facilitate you in whatever way I can. I suppose this counts as that.

  And you couldn’t sound more enthusiastic about it.

  Too right. Just get yourself over here pronto.

  Aye-aye, lieutenant. Sorry. I mean: yes, ma’am.

  13

  DEV LEFT HANDLER a message explaining what he was doing. The ISS liaison would find it in his inbox when he woke up.

  He then set the jetboat’s controls to maintain a steady position a safe distance from the Egersund and dived overboard. He surged along underwater, covering the couple of hundred metres to the Admiral Winterbrook in just over a minute, a time not even the fastest Pure Olympic swimmer would have been able to equal, although an enhanced Free Olympian might. He ascended the rope ladder that had been lowered over the catamaran’s side for him, and was assisted over the gunwale by a powerful hand that clamped over his wrist and pulled.

  The hand belonged to a corporal – by far the tallest woman Dev had ever seen, and quite possibly the broadest too. Her grip had been like a bear trap, and he suspected she had been using only a small fraction of her full strength. Laced with augmentations and modifications, the corporal looked capable of pulverising rocks in her fists.

  Her name tag said Milgrom, and she was accompanied by Private First Class Blunt and Private First Class Francis. These two women were small compared to her but both sizeable nonetheless, well above average. Bulked out with ceramic-tile body armour and bristling with ammo and ordnance, the three of them were a formidable proposition.

  Sigursdottir appeared on deck, and Milgrom, Blunt and Francis all came smartly to attention. The sea-pattern camo on their battledress had been switched to active. Waves of colour, predominantly blue and grey, rippled across the fabric, moving even as the wearers of the battledress stood perfectly still.

  “Just pulled this tiddler out of the water, sir,” said Milgrom. “Looks kind of shrimpy. Shall we throw him back?”

  “Don’t tempt me,” said Sigursdottir. She gave Dev a once-over from head to toe as his clothing rapidly dripped dry. “You ready for this? You aren’t carrying any weaponry.”

  “I thought this was a rescue expedition. I’ll take a gun if there’s one going begging.”

  “Francis, lend him your sidearm. Don’t give me that look, private. You’ve got plenty else to use.”

  PFC Francis grumblingly unbuckled her hip holster and passed it across to Dev. He fastened it on and drew the gun to inspect it. Could be worse: a Heckler & Koch hypervelocity pistol, which used a burst of piston-generated condensed hydrogen gas to propel sabot rounds at a speed of seven kilometres per second. The holster belt held an ample quantity of spare ammo clips.

  “Don’t these things have a tendency to jam?” he said. “Fragments of rupture disc get stuck in the high pressure coupling.”

  “Only on the old models,” said Francis. “That there is the HK HVP Mark Two. The rupture discs are programmable plastic now, rather than stainless steel. Under pressure they disperse into a cloud of particles that gets vented out of the muzzle behind the round.”

  “I believe Mr Harmer knew that already,” said Sigursdottir. “He was just trying to show he’s not an amateur. He wants us to know he’s got game.”

  “In a tactful way,” Dev said.

  “Tact’s wasted on me,” said Francis.

  “And me,” said Blunt. “Blunt by name, blunt by nature.”

  “Well then, in the spirit of bluntness, I don’t suppose it’ll matter if I mention the words ‘all-woman team,’” said Dev.

  “Depends what you mean by it,” said Milgrom. “If you mean ‘I’m not working with a bunch of girls,’ then I’d be correcting that opinion sharpish if I were you. Otherwise you could end up like that redback back there, only not as pretty-looking.”

  “No. All I meant was, Sigursdottir told me she would be sending men aboard.”

  “I should have specified their gender?” said the lieutenant. “I use the word men as shorthand. For your information, everyone on board this boat is female. My entire team – ladies. Girls. With boobs and everything. Is that going to be an issue?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “Good. Because if it was going to be an issue, it would be your issue, if you get my drift.”

  “Noted,” said Dev. “I’ve adjusted my attitude accordingly. Please no one cut my balls off.”

  “Oh, we wouldn’t touch your balls,” said Milgrom, leaning in so close to Dev that he could smell the chewing gum on her breath and see the stippling of fine dark hairs on her top lip. “It wouldn’t be worth our while trying to find them.”

  Blunt and Francis both chortled. Sigursdottir smirked.

  Dev just smiled. “Are we done hazing the newbie? That ship over there may be sinking. Unless you’ve a few more insults to unload, perhaps we should focus on searching it while we still can. Yes?”

  Milgrom grunted, then nodded. “I’ve not begun insulting you, fish-face. But sure, let’s save that for later. Meantime, we’ve got a ghost ship to explore.”

  14

  THE ADMIRAL WINTERBROOK hove to at the Egersund’s stern, adjacent to the ramp. Milgrom and Blunt fired grappling guns. The hooks arced to the top of the ramp, trailing lengths of synthetic spider-silk rope behind them and fastened electromagnetically to the metalwork. Milgrom gave the rope on hers an experimental tug to establish that it was secure. Then, with the end of the rope wrapped around her upper arm, she took a running jump and leapt from the catamaran to the whaler.

  Blunt alighted beside her a moment later, and the two Marines hauled themselves hand over hand up the ramp. At the top, they launched hoverdrones from wristlets in their forearms. The micro aircraft unfurled rotors and rose to five metres, sporting four-way camera arrays that transmitted images to their commplants.

  Eyes in the sky. Eyes in the backs of their heads.

  Coilgun rifles unshouldered, Milgrom and Blunt performed a sweep of the aft deck, right and left, mirroring each other. The hoverdrones accompanied them like kites on invisible strings.

  Once the all-clear was given, Sigursdottir and Francis sprang onto the ramp and clambered up to join them.

  Dev went last. Catching the grappling hook rope as he landed, he clambered up the steep, slimy slope, the smears of old blood making the steel slippery. Unlike the Marines, he didn’t have grip-soled boots.

  The Marines were already on the move, heading forward in two-by-two formation. Milgrom’s and Blunt’s hoverdrones whispered obediently along overhead.

  The central section of the Egersund’s deck was a kind of industrialised outdoor abattoir. There were servo-powered exoskeleton suits fitted with huge circular saws and long serrated blades designed specifically for flensing whale flesh. There were dicing machines you could have driven a van through, with a grid of criss-crossing filaments that reduced whatever was shoved into them to neat, manageable metre-wide cubes. A network of channels carried the spilled blood aft to the ramp.

  The stench of rotten meat permeated the air. The channels he
ld a tarry black residue like grisly molasses. The exoskeleton suits stood at attention, hollow executioners awaiting the order to start chopping.

  An external staircase led up to the bridge. The hoverdrones remained outside, keeping lookout, while Dev and the Marines entered.

  The bridge was unoccupied, but there were indications that whoever had been here had not left willingly. Some of the consoles bore bullet holes, one window had been smashed, and there were still-wet blood spatters on the walls.

  Dev noticed something else: a patch of charring on the vinyl upholstery of the captain’s chair.

  “Flash discharge?” he wondered aloud. “From a plasma beam weapon?”

  Sigursdottir shook her head. “Nope. Seen this before. It’s a bioelectric burn.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sea monkeys,” said Milgrom. “I knew it had to be. Fucking sea monkeys did this.”

  “Hold on. Sea monkeys?”

  “Tritonians,” said Sigursdottir. “We’re not supposed to call them that,” she added, shooting a look at Milgrom.

  Her subordinate merely shrugged her massive shoulders. “Tritonians, schmitonians,” she muttered. “Sea monkeys is what they are.”

  “That” – Sigursdottir pointed to the charring – “is what you get when a Tritonian fires a shock lance at point blank range, in air. See the star-shaped scorch?”

  Dev recalled the two Tritonians who had saved him from the thalassoraptor. The female had been carrying a weapon which was an amalgamation of coral and a softer organic material. He was guessing that that was a shock lance.

  “Tritonians boarded this ship,” he said.

  “Seems so. A raiding party.”

  “They’re amphibious? My understanding is they can’t breathe out of water.”

  “They can for short periods. As long as their gills stay moist enough, they can extract diffused oxygen from the air. Like mudskippers do, and climbing perch. Crabs too.”

  “Not the type of crabs you’ve got, Blunt,” said Francis.

  “Hey, fuck you.”

  “From fraternising with Master Chief Reynolds.”

  “That was you. In your dreams.”

  “Before settlers came along, the Tritonians never had any reason to leave the sea,” said Milgrom. “They probably didn’t even realise they could, until they decided they needed to attack humans in their own element. They learned the knack of air breathing pretty fast.”

  “They can last half an hour, an hour tops,” said Sigursdottir. “It’s enough.”

  “So Tritonians were here,” said Dev, “but they must have gone by now. The Egersund’s been beaming out that mayday for a couple of hours. They did whatever they did, then left.”

  “Assume nothing.”

  “The question is, where’s the Egersund’s crew?”

  “That’s the biggie, isn’t it? I think our next step should be to go below and eyeball what’s down there.”

  15

  SIGURSDOTTIR LED DEV and her team into the bowels of the whaler. She and Milgrom took point; Blunt and Francis had the rear. Dev, in the middle, felt like a VIP being protected by a phalanx of bodyguards. The hoverdrones had returned to their roosts on Milgrom’s and Blunt’s arms like well-trained hunting falcons, folding themselves neatly away into the wristlets.

  The Marines held their rifles high, sighting along them, quartering every corner they turned and every room they entered. The four women moved with practised speed and precision, each aware of the others’ whereabouts at all times. They were pure military efficiency, a symphony of teamwork.

  The Egersund groaned softly and insistently, and every now and then a shudder ran through it like a small earth tremor. Dev was conscious of the slight tilt of the floor under him. The ship was skewed to port and aft. He couldn’t tell if the incline was steepening or not.

  The whaler doubtless had a double hull and watertight partitions between its bulkheads, as any large ship did. Polymer-crystal adhesive injectors as well, to soak up the water and provide a seal. A single, localised rupture in its skin would not be a fatal blow. It would, though, necessitate bringing the ship to a dead stop, if only so that a damage inspection could be carried out.

  Dev could only presume that the Tritonians had put a hole in the Egersund for precisely that reason – disable the whaler so that the captain had no alternative but to halt. Then they could board with ease.

  The search party arrived at the Egersund’s mess hall, where Dev half expected to see unfinished meals on the tables. But the room was spick and span. When the Tritonians struck, the crew had been busy outside dealing with the freshly caught redback whale, not having a meal.

  Sigursdottir ordered a five-minute rest break. Milgrom kept lookout at the main door while the others set down their rifles and took a load off their feet. A canister of water was passed round, although Dev, pointedly, was not offered any.

  He shared with Sigursdottir his theory about how the Tritonians had forced the Egersund to stop. She agreed it was the likeliest scenario.

  “The thing about these particular indigenes,” she said, “is they’re not dumb. Don’t go thinking they’re primitives, savages, whatever. They aren’t. They’re a sophisticated, technologically adept race. Just because they don’t have Riemann Deviation drive spaceships and comms devices wired into their brains doesn’t mean they’re not every bit as smart as us.”

  “Crafty buggers as well,” Blunt interjected.

  “They may have started from a different baseline,” Sigursdottir continued. “They may use organic materials rather than predominantly inorganic like we do. But you underestimate them at your peril. Out of the water as well as in, they’re to be respected.”

  “And blasted to bits if they so much as look at you funny,” Milgrom commented from the doorway.

  “Hoo-rah!” said Francis, and she and Blunt high-fived.

  Sigursdottir grimaced. “As you can tell,” she said to Dev, “the Tritonians haven’t exactly endeared themselves to us in recent months.”

  “TerCon Marines,” said Dev. “Famous for their tolerance towards civilians and non-Terrans.”

  That almost – almost – provoked a smile from the stolid, imperturbable lieutenant. He could see it in her eyes, even if it didn’t quite extend to her face.

  “ISS operatives,” she retorted. “Famous for being sarcastic dickwads.”

  “I’ll have you know I earned us that reputation single-handedly.”

  They resumed their journey through the Egersund’s labyrinthine interior, heading further down, deeper. Signs on the wall pointed the way toward a storage hold, so they followed them until they emerged into a cavernous space, very cold, traversed by conveyor belts, which were currently static. Compressor fans on a dozen huge refrigeration units thrummed reverberantly. Heavy-duty hooks were suspended from the ceiling on pulley chains, swaying ever so slightly as the stationary ship lolled.

  Here, at last, were the crew.

  There were perhaps forty of them all told. They hung from the hooks, limp and inert, and had, to a man and woman, been eviscerated. Innards lay clumped in heaps below their feet, still attached to their owners, unspooled from gashes in their bellies. Flesh had been stripped away, in some cases clean to the bone. Here and there a limb had been lopped.

  Like countless redbacks, the whaler’s crew had been methodically and ruthlessly butchered.

  “The phrase ‘poetic justice’ springs to mind,” said Dev.

  “The lieutenant said the sea monkeys aren’t savages,” said Milgrom. “This’d seem to contradict that, don’t you think?”

  They examined the bodies one after another to see if any of them was by some miracle still alive. None was. Dulled, horrified eyes stared down emptily at them. Slack mouths hung open in silent cries of protest.

  “Is this everybody?” said Blunt. “The whole crew accounted for?”

  “I’ve patched into the ship’s onboard manifest and apparently it has a complement of forty-three, so yes,
by a rough head count, I guess this is it,” said Sigursdottir. “The Tritonians were thorough. Rounded them all up, marched them down here, strung them up like sides of beef and slaughtered them. Didn’t miss anyone out.”

  “What for?” said Dev. “Why do this?”

  “To scare the shit out of us, for one thing.”

  “Full marks to them, then,” said Blunt. “Achievement unlocked.”

  “But also, more importantly, to send a message. They don’t like humans killing redbacks. It offends them.”

  “Do they regard these whales as sacred or something?” said Dev.

  “Not particularly. In fact, they harvest them as well. Use them as a source of food and construction materials. Clothing too. They make their own version of leather from redback hide steeped in the redback’s own ambergris. Whalers like this are poaching their game and hence pissing them off.”

  “There are less drastic ways of showing you’re upset,” Dev pointed out.

  “The Tritonians aren’t really big on dialogue and diplomacy,” said Sigursdottir. “Ask your friend Handler. He’s the one who’s supposed to be the ambassador between us and them. Ask him how much success he’s had getting them to see things from our point of view or, for that matter, putting their point of view across to us.”

  “Spoiler,” said Milgrom. “Not a lot.”

  “The history of settler–indigene relations on Triton has never been a happy one,” Sigursdottir said. “Mostly it’s been a case of the two sides trying to ignore each other as much as possible. Handler and all the envoys before him, they’ve not been much more than window-dressing. Lip service to the idea of mediation. Something to show we’ve at least made an effort, we’ve tried to be reasonable, we’ve met the Tritonians halfway...”

  “So don’t blame us if they haven’t reciprocated,” said Dev.

  “Bingo.”