World of Water

by James Lovegrove

  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.”

  Dozens of the plaited vines of bladderwrack crawled over the gunwales, probing their way onto the lower deck. The Admiral Winterbrook was in the same predicament, entwined all around in a questing, squirming mesh of seaweedy growth.

  Milgrom leapt from the seat of the point-defence gun and began slashing away with a shimmerknife. A couple of other Marines came out on deck to help her, but it was hopeless. For every vine they severed, another slithered up to take its place.

  Dev pulled out his HVP as a tendril of the bladderwrack began climbing the ladder to the flybridge.

  “Wait!” Handler cried. “You’ll damage the boat.”

  “I think the boat has more to be worried about than a hole from a sabot round. So do we.”

  “Sorry. You’re right. Fire away.”

  Dev blasted the encroaching twist of seaweed in two, also managing to blow out a chunk of deck.

  It made very little difference, however. The severed vine fell away but the stump carried on regardless, worming its blunt tip up the rungs and wrapping offshoots of itself around the handrails for added support.

  “Shit,” said Dev. “This is not going to work.”

  The Reckless Abandon lurched under them. The bladderwrack had a firm stranglehold on the boat and was lashing further vines around it and flexing them ever tighter.

  “I think it wants to pull us under,” Handler gasped.

  “I think you’re right.”

  “What are we going to do? Tell me you have an idea, Harmer. Please! Tell me there’s a way out of this.”

  Dev’s mind had gone blank. He couldn’t think of anything. The Reckless Abandon was listing rearwards. The bladderwrack was everywhere, glistening strands of it all over the boat, driving through doorways into the cabins.

  He and Handler couldn’t simply jump overboard. He doubted they would last long once they landed in that oozy morass of stems and air sacs. They would be mired, sucked down, suffocated.

  What about crossing over to the Admiral Winterbrook somehow? The Marine catamaran was still level in the water.

  He doubted it would last much longer, however. Only a matter of time before the bladderwrack covered it too. And they couldn’t reach it anyway. The gap between it and the Reckless Abandon was a good five metres, too wide to leap.

  They were screwed.

  Both boats were as good as lost.

  Unless...

  38

  “HANDLER,” DEV SAID, “where’s the fuel tank on this thing?”

  “Just aft of amidships.”

  “Port or starboard?”

  “Both. One on either side.”

  “Below or above the waterline?”

  “Just above.”

  Dev leaned out from the flybridge and fired several rounds into the side of the boat in a diagonal line.

  All the shots punched ragged gouges but it was the last three that actually drew blood, as it were. Liquid methane spurted out in a trio of clear, jetting streams. The fuel spread quickly, dispersing to form a viscous, iridescent layer across the water and the bladderwrack.

  The sentient seaweed recoiled, evidently finding the methane noxious. Not noxious enough, however, to release the Reckless Abandon. If anything, the plant seemed peeved that someone was trying to poison it. The vines redoubled their efforts to drag the jetboat down.

  “So much for that plan,” Handler said, on the verge of despair. “All you’ve done is piss it off.”

  “I’m not finished yet.”

  Dev had in fact been hoping that the fuel spill would drive the bladderwrack away. Since it had failed in that aim, he had no choice but to resort to Plan B, something a little more drastic.

  “Handler, listen to me. We’re going to have to jump ship.”

  “Abandon the Reckless Abandon?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “But you said it would be suicide to –”

  “I know what I said, but circumstances have changed. We have a shot at getting through this, but the price is you’re going to have to kiss your boat goodbye.”

  Handler groaned.

  “It’s fucked anyway,” Dev said brusquely. “But it can at least buy us a chance to get clear, and maybe save the Admiral Winterbrook into the bargain.”

  “You’re going to scuttle it?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Wait just a second.”

  Sigursdottir, does that point-defence gun of yours have incendiary ammo?

  We can load some. Why?

  See the fuel pouring out of the Reckless Abandon?

  Gotcha. Say no more. What’s the timescale? How long do you need?

  How long’s it going to take to load that ammo?

  No more than thirty seconds.

  Then that’s our timescale.

  He disconnected the commplant call, only to find that Handler had quit the flybridge. The ISS liaison was scooting down the ladder, taking care not to touch the wreathing, writhing bladderwrack.

  “Where the fuck are you going?” Dev shouted.

  “Your nucleotide shots,” Handler called back. “I have to get them.”

  “Oh, you...”

  Dev bit back a curse and flew down the ladder after him. Handler ducked into the main cabin, stepping over the vines that now infested the floor. Dev followed.

  In the confined space the bladderwrack’s stench was repulsive, rotten as well as briny. The vines had fastened themselves to anything that was fixed in place, wrapping around the bulkheads, the bolted-down seats, the table legs, every projection and fitting. If Dev and Handler stood still even for just a few seconds, the bladderwrack would latch on to them too.

  “Handler, this is the worst possible moment for heroics.”

  “I just need to...”

  Handler was grappling with a cupboard door, unpicking the vine holding it shut.

  Dev, after a brief inner debate, went over to assist. Together they managed to tear the vine loose from the door handle.

  Inside the cupboard lay the shockproof metallic case that stored the serum patches. Handler grabbed it, a
nd he and Dev raced back out on deck.

  Dev didn’t know how much time they had lost. More than they could reasonably afford, he reckoned.

  The Admiral Winterbrook’s point-defence gun was swivelling, coming to bear. Fuel was still gushing from the Reckless Abandon’s perforated tank. The slick it had created across the top of the bladderwrack was now some sixty or so metres in diameter, and still growing. The air above the slick was shimmering as the methane, released from the pressurised containment that kept it cooled and liquefied, began to evaporate.

  “Come on!”

  Dev grasped Handler by the scruff of the neck and hauled him up the sloping deck to the bows.

  “If this works, we should get an opening to dive in.”

  “‘If’? ‘Should’?”

  “Give me a break. I make these things up on the fly. Desperate measures are never an exact science.”

  The gun began blazing. Nitroamine explosive rounds raked the methane slick, and in a flash, the sea was on fire.

  The bladderwrack collectively convulsed, the entire expanse of seaweed responding as one. It churned and roiled.

  “You’ve hurt it!” Handler crowed, exuberant.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think it can feel pain the way you or I do. But it’s smart enough to know it doesn’t want to burn.”

  The vines interlaced around the Reckless Abandon were no longer clinging to it quite so tenaciously. In the water, the bladderwrack was breaking up. It less of a dense knotted mass and more of a loose agglomeration.

  This was the best – the only – opportunity Dev and Handler were going to get.

  Dev threw Handler off the front of the Reckless Abandon. The ISS liaison plunged into the midst of the bladderwrack, clutching the case of serum patches to his chest. Dev was right beside him.

  Not a moment too soon, either, as the flames on the sea found the source of the liquid methane. One of the Reckless Abandon’s fuel tanks, then the other, went up. The entire jetboat rose clear of the water as it exploded, and when it came back down it was in two pieces, broken in the middle like a snapped branch.

  Dev heard, saw and felt the explosion, a burst of brilliance behind and above him, even as he clawed down through the coils of bladderwrack, pulling Handler along. He ignored the slap and clench of the vegetation, focusing solely on pressing onwards, getting to the bottom of it and out.

  How deep was this matted mess of seaweed anyway? How far down did you have to go to be free of it?

  It looked as though he might never find out, because the bladderwrack began to coalesce around him and Handler. The seaweed had detected the presence of the two humans, intruders. Even disorientated by the fire raging on the surface, it still remembered its job was to seek and destroy.

  Dev felt strands of it reaching for him, groping for purchase. He could barely see. Everything was a field of ravelling, snaky brown plant matter.

  Then he and Handler were snarled in it, snared. They could no longer move. Up, down, in every direction, the bladderwrack crowded in on them, stifling, crushing.

  The more Dev struggled against it, the firmer its python-like embrace became.

  It was going for his neck.

  It was determined to clamp his gills shut.

  And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  39

  HE FELT A push from below, a surging rush.

  Then he and Handler were rising, as though a giant cupped hand was lifting them.

  Dev glimpsed the outline of a huge rounded rectangle below, like a hole coming up to swallow them.

  Which was exactly what it was.

  Ethel, you fishy beauty.

  The rectangle was the mouth of a manta sub – Ethel’s, it had to be – and it engulfed them, scooping them up inside as the vessel ascended vertically at speed. The sub was ploughing a path to the surface through the bladderwrack, taking Dev and Handler with it.

  Dev deftly hooked an elbow over the rim of the manta’s mouth, keeping a tight grip on Handler with his other hand. The sub’s incursion had torn them free from the bladderwrack’s grasp, but fronds of the seaweed were still battering them and twisting around them as they rose. He clung on grimly against the onslaught.

  Then, all at once, they were soaring into the air. The manta sub shot up like a rocket, five, ten, fifteen metres clear of the sea, shedding bits of bladderwrack as it went.

  Reaching apogee, the manta turned with its wings outstretched and began a surprisingly graceful descent. It didn’t fall so much as glide, several tons of sea beast coming down at a low angle and hitting the water with a hefty but controlled wallop, a bellyflop mitigated by the mattress of bladderwrack the sub landed on.

  All the same, the two humans in its mouth were nearly jolted free. Only by hanging on for dear life was Dev able to keep himself and Handler from being ejected like morsels of bad food.

  The manta sub had come to rest not far from the Admiral Winterbrook and the shattered, sinking wreck of the Reckless Abandon. Fire burned across a swathe of the sea, and for a moment Dev thought he and Handler had been saved from the bladderwrack only to face a worse fate. The manta sub was surely stranded, helpless. How could it burrow back down through the seaweed without a run-up to achieve the same impetus it had used in its ascent? And the flames were spreading...

  But he had underestimated both Ethel and her vessel.

  The manta sub started to rock and shudder. It seemed to be floundering, thrashing about in panic.

  No.

  It was moving.

  It was using its wings to propel itself across the bladderwrack, lurching forward like an elephant seal on dry land. There was nothing elegant about the procedure. It was a cumbersome lollop, demanding a huge amount of effort and achieving very little. The sub wasn’t getting anywhere fast.

  But it was getting somewhere. A few metres at a time, it was crawling over the swampy morass of bladderwrack.

  Dev and Handler were tossed violently around inside the manta’s mouth. There was nothing to grab onto for support except the creature’s gill arches, but even after Dev had established a handhold and foothold here, and made Handler do the same, they still found themselves being bounced bruisingly up and down. Dev felt it worst in his cracked molars, which sent bolts of pain into his skull with every bump his body suffered.

  How long the torturous journey lasted, Dev had no idea. It was probably no more than four minutes, but it felt like forty. The manta sub’s exertions grew increasingly urgent. With no water flowing into its mouth and through its gills, it was running out of oxygen.

  Then it was past the edge of the bladderwrack and plunging headlong into open water. It shook off the last few strands of seaweed still adhering to its body, and soon it was planing smoothly through the water once more, at home in its natural element.

  Dev thrust himself out of its mouth. He offered a quick flash of gratitude to Ethel, who sat at her piloting station in the manta’s intact eye, before shooting up to the surface.

  The Admiral Winterbrook.

  The Marine catamaran was, for all he knew, still marooned in the centre of the bladderwrack, surrounded by burning liquid methane. If Sigursdottir and her team had taken the option of abandoning ship the way he and Handler had, then they needed retrieving from the seaweed too, and quickly. Once he had assessed the situation, he would go back down and get Ethel to attempt another rescue operation if one was needed.

  At first all he could see was a coruscating wall of fire. No sign of the Admiral Winterbrook. Tongues of flame licked upward from the sea, rising from a coal-black bed of burnt, shrivelled bladderwrack.

  Had Sigursdottir found a way out? Or had her boat gone down with all hands, either consumed by the fire or dragged under by the sentient seaweed?

  Sigursdottir? Sigursdottir!

  No reply.

  Shit. That could mean only one thing.

  Dev tried to console himself with the fact that the Marines had been professional soldiers. They had signed
on the dotted line knowing the job brought with it a risk of getting killed. They hadn’t been forced to join up, as he had. They hadn’t been part of TerCon’s juvenile offender conscription programme and offered the not-really-a-choice of military service or a spell in prison. They had been well aware of what they were getting into and how they might come out of it: feet first.

  All the same, he couldn’t help feeling at least partly responsible for their deaths. If not for him, the eight of them would even now be sitting safe and sound at Station Ares, rather than plummeting into the icy depths of Triton’s ocean. Their final resting place lay so far from Earth that the light reaching it from the Sun, one of the fainter stars in the night sky, was twenty thousand years old.

  He would have to break the bad news to Captain Maddox. That was a conversation he wasn’t looking forward to. He imagined the grizzled old bastard would not take kindly to losing eight of his complement, a favoured lieutenant among them. He foresaw bellowing. Not to mention the threat – and perhaps the application – of physical violence.

  A low, steady rumble caught Dev’s attention, and he looked up. There, to his left, was the Admiral Winterbrook, hoving into view around the edge of the field of bladderwrack. It had emerged from somewhere behind the curtain of flames, which had been screening it from his sight.

  Sigursdottir, you made it!

  What’s that? Harmer, your signal’s breaking up. Repeat.

  I said, you made it.

  Ah. Yes. Well, we owe it to you, I suppose. When the seaweed started burning, it lost its grip on us. Like it got frightened and forgot what it was meant to be doing. Jiang goosed the motor and we reversed out. Been looking for you since. We thought you might not have made it.

  Well, I’m here.

  Sorry, say again. You keep cutting out.

  My commplant must be misbehaving.

  That’ll be why we can’t get a GPS fix on you.