World of Water (25 page)

Dev pulled up data on Dakuwaqa’s population from an insite. The township was – had been – home to approximately six thousand. Like its companion towns Opochtli and Mazu, it was a thriving community. The warm, fertile waters of the Tropics of Lei Gong yielded the densest and most easily harvested fish stocks, compensating for the not always congenial climate. The methane mining was good here, too.

Six thousand men, women and children – slaughtered.

The worshippers of the Ice King had proved, once and for all, that they meant business.

Question, lieutenant. How did they manage it? Up until now the incidents have been relatively small-scale. This is a major step up. They’ve either adopted a new tactic or they’ve got some weapon we don’t know about.

That’s what I’m thinking. They could have overrun the place with sheer numbers, I guess, then torched it as they left.

But there’d have been resistance, surely. And the settlers would have had time to get a distress signal out. This happened suddenly, without warning, too quickly for anyone to react. Nobody was able to retaliate or escape. It’s like the insurgents used a bomb...

But they don’t have bombs.

Something similar to a bomb, then. I mean, look at the way some of the domes are caved in. It’s hard to tell through all the smoke and flame, but can you see? It’s as though they were struck from above. Crushed, almost. As though they had things land on them.

I see that. And then those same things set them alight. But the Tritonian weaponry I’ve encountered so far has all been hand-to-hand. Have you heard of them deploying anything with this level of yield?

Not before now. But the evidence of my own eyes is telling me the status quo has changed. And with Dakuwaqa gone, where’s going to be next?

Opochtli or Mazu, I’d imagine.

We’ve got to send a warning. Get both townships to evacuate.

Good idea. We should also head for one of them ourselves, whichever’s nearer. Try and overtake the insurgents before they can launch another attack of the same magnitude. We’re going to have to be extra careful, though. Remember the
Egersund
?

What about the
Egersund
?

The people who carried out the massacre left a vessel behind, didn’t they? To finish the job. The rest of them moved on after they’d done killing the crew, but the cuttlefish sub hung around in order to sink the ship and us with it.

Your point being...?

It was a trap. Straight out of the terrorist playbook. You commit an atrocity, knowing that someone is bound to come running. Then, to cause maximum carnage and outrage, you spring a sneaky follow-up attack and take out the people who’ve just arrived.

Like in the days of suicide bombers. One of them would blow up the marketplace, then when the cops and ambulances turned up, a second suicide bomber would take care of them too.

Or there’d be a second improvised explosive device with a delay fuse to catch the people who went to the aid of the people hurt by the first improvised explosive device. Who’s to say the insurgents haven’t done the same thing here, just like at the
Egersund
? We need to keep our wits about us and proceed with caution. I wouldn’t put it past these cunning bastards to have left another trap for us.

The two boats moved off slowly, giving Dakuwaqa a wide berth and making sure to stay upwind to avoid catching any stray embers from the blaze.

I’ve managed to hail Mazu, Harmer. The head councillor there was already concerned after contact with Dakuwaqa was lost. He knew the place had gone dark but had no idea why.

And now that he does...?

He’s implementing a full, township-wide emergency evacuation. Every functioning boat is going to embark as many passengers as will fit and get the fuck out of there as fast as it can.

Great. What about Opochtli?

Not so great. We’re not getting through. Private Fakhouri is multiple-messaging everyone on the town’s contacts list insite. Not a single reply yet.

Fakhouri. Dev remembered her from the tapas restaurant on Llyr. A quiet and unassuming individual with dark, intelligent eyes, she had seemed happy for Milgrom, Blunt and Francis to hog the limelight. From what he could tell, she was a stickler for protocol and accuracy, as befitted a comms specialist.

Fuck.

Might just be some kind of signals interference. Typhoon brewing. Maybe that’s playing havoc with the satellite relay.

You don’t think that anymore than I do.

No, I do not.

Then Opochtli’s our next port of call.

“Uhh, Harmer?”

“Yes?”

Handler gestured at the sonar screen.

Dev scowled. “What in the name of sanity is that?”

Less than a kilometre ahead sat an amorphous shape, like some pale red amoeba. It was perhaps half a kilometre across, and it lay more or less directly in their path.

“Whatever it is, it’s not a single entity,” Handler said. “It’s diffuse. A mass of... something. Some
things
.”

“Fish? A shoal?”

“Hard to say. The sonar profile is similar, but not the same.”

“Where did it come from?”

“It just appeared a moment or so ago. Like it welled up from below.”

“We should divert around, just to be on the safe side.”

“Already on it.”

“Good work.”

Sigursdottir...

Seen it. Any ideas?

Not a clue, but it’s big and anomalous and I don’t like it for both those reasons.

Me either.

It’s also... Shit. Yes. I think it’s moving. As in, trying to cut us off.

It didn’t seem possible, but the amoeboid mass on the screen was indeed moving. It was shifting as if to intercept the boats, its central mass thinning as it extended towards them. Dev thought of a pseudopod unfurling. An arm reaching out to curb them.

Looking ahead, all he could see was a dark patch in the churning whitecaps, where the sea’s surface was that little bit less wrinkled, a little smoother. It didn’t give much indication as to what lay beneath.

He noted, however, that the manta subs had pulled back. They were no longer keeping pace with the jetboat and the catamaran.

That was most definitely not a good sign.

“Handler, bring us about,” he said. “I still have no idea what that thing is, but we can’t go round it and we certainly don’t want to go over it.”

Handler disabled the navigation computer and took manual control. He threw the
Reckless Abandon
into a tight U-turn.

At that moment, Dev realised to his dismay that a second amoeboid shape was manifesting on the sonar screen.

Right behind them.

It occupied the space between the surface boats and the manta subs, cutting the two sets of vessels off from one another.

Encirclement.

They had been well and truly suckered.

Was this what had wrecked Dakuwaqa, Dev wondered? Was this the insurgents’ weapon of mass destruction?

If so, he, Handler and the Marines were deep in the shit.

And if it wasn’t, if it was something else...

Then they were, he suspected, just as deep in the shit.

37

T
HE AMOEBOID SHAPES
on the sonar screen were closing in, extending and bending together to form a rough oval, with the two boats corralled within.

Still there was nothing visible to the naked eye except a greasy smoothness on the sea’s surface, somewhat like an oil slick. Now and then Dev caught a glimpse of a brown, whip-like
something
bulging out of the water, there and gone in a split second. Limb? Body? Tentacle? He couldn’t tell.

Handler spun the
Reckless Abandon
, looking for a way out, but in vain. The two masses finished merging and became one, shutting off all channels of escape.

And now it began contracting around the boats, like a noose tightening. The area of clear water inside it shrank fast. Handler had to nudge the
Reckless Abandon
up beside the
Admiral Winterbrook
. There was nowhere else to go, no more wiggle room.

On the catamaran, the Marines were preparing to fight. Milgrom manned the forward point-defence gun, the targeting system of which was now slaved to her commplant. Jiang had torpedoes primed and ready to fire.

They got a heads-up from Sigursdottir.

Hang on, gentlemen. We’re going to fight our way out. It’s going to get loud.

It got loud. The point-defence gun’s quartet of barrels boomed, sending volleys of 12.7mm fragmentation rounds into the water in broad, sweeping arcs. A torpedo shot out of its tube in the catamaran’s left hull like a seal slipping off an iceberg. It furrowed straight ahead, detonating some fifty metres from the
Admiral Winterbrook
, raising a funnel of white water mingled with fragments of dark, pulpy tissue.

The net result of these heavy-ordnance attacks was...

Nothing.

The oval mass just kept on narrowing in remorselessly, undeterred. The
Admiral Winterbrook
might as well have been chucking paper darts at a wall, for all the effect its firepower had. Sigursdottir seemed to realise as much, because no more torpedoes were forthcoming and the point-defence gun soon stopped its strafing.

All at once the hollow, tightening oval on the screen became a solid and the two boats were fully engulfed. The mass had swamped them. There was no distinguishing their sonar signatures amid the pinkish cloud that had subsumed them.

Dev peered over the side of the jetboat and saw dense, tangled rods of living matter seething in the water. They were lobed and fluted, with here and there a blister of some sort, a pouch the size of his fist. His nose was hit by a strong brackish smell that took him back to a school trip to the seaside in his youth.

Could it be...?

Then the
Reckless Abandon
’s engine died.

Handler hit the ignition. Yanked the throttle handle back and forth.

No good.

“We have power,” he said, flustered. “Just no propulsion.”

The boat’s computer flashed up an explanation. The pump intakes were blocked, so the engine had automatically shut down to protect itself from overheating.

“That stuff’s clogged them up,” Dev said. “Any way of clearing them?”

“Apart from going down into the water and doing it by hand? No.”

“I wouldn’t get into the sea right now if you paid me. I’m not sure what this shit around us is, but climbing into it doesn’t strike me as the way to find out.”

Next moment the
Admiral Winterbrook
stalled too.

Our propellers are snarled. What are we up against here, Harmer?

Beats me, Sigursdottir. Best guess, some kind of seaweed.

Seaweed?

What it looks like. Smells like, too.

Seaweed doesn’t move of its own accord. It doesn’t surround you and deliberately paralyse your boat.

This seaweed does. It reminds me of bladderwrack. That brownish crap you find washed up on the beach or clinging to rocks below the tideline. Only... I think it might be sentient.

You’re shitting me.

I don’t make the biological rules here, Sigursdottir. It’s Triton. This is Tritonian fauna. Or flora. Whichever. Both together, maybe.

And it has a brain?

Some kind of collective intelligence. That or it’s being manipulated.

By insurgents?

Why not? Tritonians use zombified sea creatures as submarines and have guns made of coral and soft tissue that fire bioelectric discharges. I don’t think weaponising a vast clump of kelp is beyond them.

Well, we’re immobilised. That’s the fact of the matter. We’ll just have to figure out a way of cutting ourselves loose.

If being immobilised is the worst that happens to us, we should be thankful.

Ever the voice of optimism, eh, Harmer?

A day and a half on the wretched piss-ball of a planet has taught me not to expect anything to work out well.

Dev hoped this would be the worst of it.

But it wasn’t.

The plant began to surge out of the water. Strands of it coiled together into thick ropey vines which spiralled up the flanks of both boats like ivy growing at time-lapse speed. The vines made slobbering wet sounds as they slapped their way up the hulls, the awful moist kiss of slimy vegetation on fibreglass and steel.

“It’s climbing the boat,” Handler said. “It’s trying to board us.”