World of Water

by James Lovegrove

  The sea spider spent a couple more minutes investigating the source of the lights it had caught sight of: Dev’s and Ethel’s conversation. It appeared not to understand why there was a barrier separating it from them. The pedipalps quested over the cornea like the hands of a sculptor over a block of raw marble, assessing it for strengths and weaknesses.

  Dev had never been as repulsed by any living being as he was at this one. The feeling intensified when the sea spider’s mouth parts opened and a pair of fangs extruded from within. A seam of fluorescent yellow venom was visible through the translucent material of each fang, running down the middle. It didn’t help that the fangs themselves were the size of his forearm.

  The manta sub remained immobile, and Dev could only admire its self-restraint. If the sea spider had been touching him like that, he could never have endured it the way the manta was.

  All the same, the manta was starting to quiver, and this time it wasn’t a result of the commotion caused by the Ice King passing overhead. The creature was becoming fractious, unstable.

  Delicately, ever so delicately, Ethel tugged on the steering stalks. The manta shrank back from the sea spider, centimetre by centimetre, with the tiniest wafts of its wings.

  The sea spider was all set to head after it, still curious. Then a ribbed hexagon-of-skin animal, possibly the one Dev had spied earlier, flopped onto it from above like a dropped carpet.

  A battle ensued, sea spider and skin hexagon wrapping themselves around each other, all legs and triangles, fangs and umbrella folds. Dev didn’t much care which of them won the fight. If they both killed each other, so much the better.

  The manta sub found a volume of clear water, a hollow among the shimmering multitudes, and halted.

  Above, the Ice King continued to search.

  50

  TIME PASSED. DEV’S head pulsed. Now and then the manta sub shook as the Ice King swam by.

  Sometimes the gargantuan crab got close, alarmingly so. The water became a mass of sweeps and swirls, rumbling like a rock slide.

  The Ice King was being thorough, no question. The chase, as far as it was concerned, was anything but over. Manta was still dish of the day. It just needed to find it.

  An hour ticked by in the abyssal fathoms, two hours, three, with distant flashes and crackles of light erupting all around and every now and then an animal appearing directly outside the cockpit, supple, lugubrious, ghostly, grim. Each seemed more repugnant than the last, as though there was an Ugliest Organism Alive contest under way and the winners were being announced in reverse order.

  After a while, though, Dev became used to the deep-sea creatures’ universal unloveliness. Grace and beauty weren’t advantages down here. To survive in this ruthlessly Darwinian environment it was best to be tough and mean, to be the sum of your offensive and defensive capabilities and no more.

  The kid.

  Suddenly, with a start, Dev remembered that the Tritonian kid was still aboard, trussed up in the sleeping chamber. The poor bastard would be experiencing the same pressure pains as he and Ethel were. It wasn’t fair just to leave him there, alone and suffering, without at least checking up on him.

  Dev scooted back along the manta’s dorsal duct.

  The kid lay listless, groans trickling across his face in thin pink rivulets.

  Dev felt his first real pang of compassion for the young Tritonian since discovering him in the tank at Llyr. Almost on a whim, he decided to untie him.

  He remained on his guard as he undid the knots. There was a chance the kid was faking. He was playing possum, hoping someone would take pity and free him, and then he would make his move. This could be some elaborate escape bid.

  If he felt anywhere near as bad as Dev did, however, that was unlikely.

  Sure enough, the kid did nothing once the bonds around his wrists and ankles were removed. He continued to lie there, even as Dev massaged his hands and feet to get the blood flow going again.

  Eventually he looked up and said wanly, Where are we?

  Dev explained as succinctly as he could.

  The Ice King... smashed up a drift cluster? the kid said.

  Afraid so. Like I told you, your god doesn’t seem to differentiate between friend and foe, Tritonian and ungilled. It’s just a big, mean, hungry bastard. Whatever takes its fancy, it kills and eats. Like it’s trying to do to us now. You’ve felt the manta sub shaking, right?

  Yes.

  That’s your holy crab, stomping around upstairs. It can’t seem to get its head round the idea that we’ve managed to elude it.

  It’s... It’s not a god after all, is it? the kid said falteringly. He was both ashamed by the realisation and, it seemed, relieved. I’ve been an idiot.

  No. Well, yes. But also, you’ve been young.

  I – I killed that man, that woman’s cousin, for nothing. The kid writhed in a paroxysm of self-recrimination. How can I ever apologise for that? How can I make up for it? I can’t, can I?

  I don’t think so. Not easily. I think all you can do is live with it, learn from your mistakes, and make sure you never fall for anyone’s line of fishcrap again.

  I heard one of them speak, one of the Ice King’s worshippers. He stopped off at our drift cluster, not long ago. He talked about fighting back against the ungilled. He talked about a glorious revolution. He swore that our god was coming back and would lead us. He was so convincing.

  Zealots often are. Fanaticism spawns fanaticism. It spreads from person to person. It’s like a disease that way.

  People tried to shout him down. They wanted to drive him out from the cluster. But there were enough of us who were curious to hear what he had to say, so we voted and he stayed, and he spoke some more, and by the end of it I felt he was right. The ungilled don’t belong here. They should be gone. They take and they taint. Why should we have to put up with that any longer?

  I’m not saying the ungilled are blameless, Dev said. Probably we shouldn’t be here. For all sorts of reasons. But it’s not as if we were oppressing you Tritonians, at least not until all this insurgency business blew up. We’re an inconvenience, you never asked us to come to your world, we never asked your permission to be here, but it could have been a lot worse.

  Perhaps there are some people who just want an enemy. They’re spoiling for a fight. Like I was.

  Yes, and they can dress it up as politics, they can dress it up as religion, but what it comes down to is they like having someone to hate. They use it to define themselves.

  You say that like it’s something you have personal experience of, the kid said.

  Once, maybe, I did. When I was your age. Authorities were my enemies. Whatever they stood for, I was against. Nowadays, my enemies are whoever the authorities point me at and tell me to fight.

  Which, Dev thought, is pretty ironic. Not to mention sad.

  But this is kind of heavy stuff to be discussing at the bottom of the ocean, he said. My head’s already killing me, and so are my gills with all the effort of breathing. Thinking is an added pain I can do without.

  The kid’s face erupted into bubbles of blotchy saffron laughter.

  Do you have a name? Dev asked. I mean, I know it takes your kind a while to figure a name out for yourselves, you don’t get given one by your parents, but...

  It’s not ready yet, the kid said. It’s changed even just lately. As it stands right now, it’s....

  The colours he displayed spoke of frustration, regret, guilt, and a faint glimmer of optimism.

  Looks raw, Dev said.

  Needs work, yes. Could be tidier. The mix isn’t right.

  But I like it. It’s something to build on.

  51

  WHEN HE LED the kid to the cockpit, Dev did not expect Ethel to be happy either that the kid was there or that he was no longer tied up.

  And she wasn’t.

  She confined herself, however, to a few acerbic comments about murderers who should be in captivity and would-be insurgents who thought they k
new all about life but knew nothing. She also muttered that the cockpit was too small for all three of them to be in it.

  She had seen the kid’s face. That was why she wasn’t angrier. It was shot through with contrition, sincere remorse. Dev doubted she would ever be willing to forgive him for his crime, and no one could blame her for that. But at that moment the kid seemed to hate himself more than she could possibly hate him, which satisfied her desire to see him suffer.

  Besides, something else had happened.

  The Ice King, she said. I think it’s moved on.

  How can you tell? Dev asked.

  Haven’t you noticed? No more disturbances in the water. There haven’t been for a while.

  Doesn’t mean it’s gone. We’ve established it’s a cunning son of a bitch. It could be doing what we’re doing, lying still, waiting. The moment we show ourselves, bam!

  We can’t stay down here indefinitely. Much longer and we’ll be doing our bodies irreparable damage.

  Then let’s go up, Dev said, but carefully. Really carefully. First sign of anything remotely crab-shaped, we zip straight back down.

  Ethel tilted the manta so that it was facing upwards at a shallow angle. With a nudge on the stalks, the sub began to ascend.

  We have to do this slowly, she said. Rise too fast from this kind of depth, and you get what we call the crawling misery.

  Decompression sickness, Dev thought. Dissolved gases in the body expanding and forming bubbles, causing joint pain, skin itching, numbness, seizures, embolisms, paralysis, even death. Commonly known as the bends.

  Divers could get it. Astronauts on extravehicular activity jaunts could get it. Anyone involved in an extreme depressurisation event could get it.

  Tritonians too, apparently.

  Dev kept watch for movement, for the slightest hint of anything untoward, as the manta climbed out of Triton’s netherworld. He knew it was a waste of effort. In this pitch blackness they would never see the Ice King coming until it was right on top of them, and probably not even then. But he couldn’t simply turn his back and not look. That would be tempting fate too far.

  The herds of benthic animals thinned, and their firework lights fell away. There was just the dark, and gradually, the dark lessened.

  Or so Dev thought. Again and again he detected a tinge of grey in the water outside, only for it to disappear, phantom-like, as though it had never been.

  His eyes, he realised. An optical illusion. His vision trying to give him what he wished for.

  The ascent seemed interminable, the blackness unending, and there was the ever-present sense that the Ice King was lurking nearby. Even now the gargantuan crab might be spying on them, stealthily mirroring their progress, keeping them in its sights, ready to pounce when they least expected. By breaking cover they had played right into its hands. Its pincers. Whatever.

  The first indication that they were truly putting the abyssal realm behind them was Dev’s headache easing. The iron band that had been clamped around his skull unclenched. The pain retreated to his ears and sinuses, and then receded altogether.

  Then he noticed that the sea was quite definitely less dark. He glimpsed faint, paler patches, moving like feathery swirls of fog.

  At around the same time, he became aware that he was breathing with almost no effort, his gills no longer heaving the water through them. The joy of not having to fight to get oxygen into your system!

  Ethel sent the manta sub into a helical climb. Since they could now see, however dimly, it made sense to scan around them as they continued to rise. Before, when the Ice King could have been anywhere in the dark, it hardly mattered which direction the manta was facing in. This way, tracing a lazy spiral, they might at least have some warning of its approach.

  The world revolved outside, getting lighter and lighter by the minute. There were fine, glinting specks, blooms of plankton, and now a shoal of metallic-shiny fish no bigger than a fingernail each, like flakes of platinum. There was life – the more normal life of the bathyal realm. This level of the ocean was still fraught with potential hazard, as all of Triton was, but it lacked the ceaseless grisly slaughter of the zone below. Lacked the loathesome rogues’ gallery as well.

  No Ice King, though. If the God Beneath The Sea was stalking the manta sub, it was staying well out of sight.

  In fact, Dev suspected the crab was nowhere hereabouts anymore. Once it had resigned itself to its inability to catch the manta, it had chosen to forget all about that failure, cut its losses and move on. Probably it was now in search of a new target, something it could take out its frustrations on. Mazu was the likeliest candidate.

  The arrival of the photic zone, with its brightness and comparative warmth, was as welcome as sunshine after a tornado. Dev could hardly bring himself to believe that they had made it back up here unscathed. He relaxed his shoulders, which he had been subconsciously hunching throughout the ascent. His nerves, taut as wires, loosened.

  The manta halted some ten metres below the surface and hung there, inert and languid. The creature was exhausted from its exertions. It needed rest, according to Ethel, and food.

  So do we all, I reckon, Dev said. But I, personally, don’t have that luxury. I have to reconnect with my ungilled allies up top.

  In particular, he had to have words with Handler. The ISS liaison was due an interrogation. Dev was determined to get to the bottom of the nucleotide serum business. Aside from obliterating the Ice King before it could wreak anymore mayhem, securing a confession out of Handler was paramount.

  He knew just how to go about getting one, too.

  52

  WHILE DEV HAD been below, the storm had grown to epic proportions. The sea swell was ferocious. Waves swept him up high, showing him an expanse of raging water as far as the eye could see, kilometre upon kilometre of grey turmoil, before cresting over his head, smothering him in foamy whiteness, and collapsing away under him, dropping him at stomach-knotting speed. The wind moaned, and rain clattered on his skull from a sky that was like wire wool from horizon to horizon.

  If this wasn’t the notorious syzygy storm, he’d hate to see what was.

  In the troughs between the waves – the all-too-brief lulls before the next surging incline of water shovelled him up dizzyingly fast – he attempted to make contact with Sigursdottir. His commplant registered the feeblest of signal strengths. The storm lay like a thick, deadening blanket between him and the nearest available satellite.

  To make matters worse, Dev was physically drained, meaning the commplant had less juice to draw on. The effort of keeping his head above water was placing further demand on his metabolic batteries. He had only a few minutes, he guessed, until the commplant went into automatic shutdown. His window of opportunity was closing rapidly.

  Then: connection.

  Harmer? Harm –

  And the signal went.

  Call interrupted. Retry?

  Dev responded to the commplant’s prompt with an okay. With the squall hissing in his ears, rain pounding his scalp, he listened for the click of connection in his head.

  Sigursdottir, don’t speak, just try to get a GPS fix on me so that you –

  Again, the signal went.

  Call interrupted. Retry?

  “No shit I want to fucking retry,” Dev said aloud, and instantly regretted it as seawater slapped into his mouth and he swallowed half of Triton.

  Third time was the charm, sort of.

  Harmer, there’s no way we’re going to be able to locate you and zero in, not in all this mess. Needle in a haystack – and someone’s shaking the haystack. We’re on course for Mazu. Do you read me? Mazu.

  Mazu. I read you. Why? I thought there’d been a full evac.

  There has, but your dirty great crab has just popped up on sonar again and it’s heading that way. We don’t want to lose track of it a second time, and as long as it doesn’t sink again, beyond sonar depth, we won’t. Can you gargle after zone cream?

  That was how the end
of the sentence sounded, at any rate. The sense of her words was lost in a churn of interference.

  Sorry. Say again.

  I said, can you get there under your own steam?

  Yes, I think I can.

  That was gibberish. Repeat.

  Yes, I think I can get there under my own steam.

  Nothing further from Sigursdottir. The signal had gone yet again, and this time Dev’s commplant couldn’t get it back. Every attempt met with resounding silence.

  So, Mazu it was. The Polis+ agent who was driving the Ice King had a checklist of Diasporan townships and was crossing them off one by one. The Plusser didn’t know Mazu was empty, and it might not make a difference anyway. Another ungilled settlement sunk, another milestone on the journey to full-blown, worldwide revolution.

  Dev ducked back under, dived down to the manta sub, and brought Ethel up to speed on the situation.

  I’ll get you there, she said, and coaxed the reluctant manta back into motion. I can’t promise we’ll go fast but we’ll make it.

  Thanks. I don’t expect anything more from you than a lift to the township. You’ve done so much already. Lost so much.

  This is still my fight. I’m more determined than ever to see it through to the end.

  How are you bearing up?

  I just gave you the answer to that, Ethel said flatly.

  First your cousin, now your friends...

  She glanced at the kid, who was skulking at the back of the cockpit, glum-faced.

  His “god” has a lot to answer for, she said.

  It’s not my god, the kid muttered. Not any longer.

  The Ice King’s worshippers also have a lot to answer for. I should like to see them pay a penalty for what they’ve done, but right now, even more than that, I’d like to see the Ice King itself pay. If you ungilled genuinely have a way of killing it...