World of Water

by James Lovegrove

  He half-filled two tumblers with the greasy, greenish liquor.

  “But we did, didn’t we?” he said. “All thanks to you, Harmer. You with your ISS expertise. You saw through it.”

  He offered one of the tumblers to Dev, who refused.

  “Once bitten,” Dev said.

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Shame. Your loss.” Maddox downed both helpings of booze in quick succession. “Ahhh. Just what the doctor ordered.”

  “It wasn’t nucleotides,” Dev said.

  “Hmmm? What’s that?”

  “In the serum.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Earlier today I stopped off at the ISS outpost on Tangaroa and used the mediplinth to run a full-spec analysis on my host form. It picked up traces of excess lysosome enzymes in my system. Those are enzymes – in case you don’t know, although I’m betting you do – that are released by dead and dying cells and cause autolysis. Autolysis literally means self-eating. Cells digesting themselves.”

  “How fascinating.”

  “Isn’t it? And the net result of an excess of these enzymes is known as sub-lethal damage. Now, it would be possible that these enzymes were a by-product of my host form falling apart – except that according to the mediplinth their DNA isn’t a match for my host form’s. It’s generic-template DNA, the kind that’s designed to map onto existing DNA, the kind that forms the basis for every gene-based therapy going. Which suggests that the enzymes were introduced artificially. Externally.”

  “Via the serum, you mean.”

  “Simply put, the serum you supplied Handler with was a non-deadly toxin. It wasn’t some military wonder drug after all, as you’d had him believe. It wasn’t keeping my supposedly compromised host form alive. It was the serum that was compromising me.”

  “I’m not sure what, if anything, you’re hoping to achieve with these accusations,” said Maddox. “These, I might add, baseless accusations.”

  “Somehow,” Dev went on, “you managed to tamper with the growth vat so that it registered host form sustainability issues that weren’t actually there. It worries me that you were able to do that, but I guess no system is impregnable. You gambled on ISS then instructing Handler to ask for your serum. You poisoned me with that so that I was off my stroke, not thinking straight. Suggestible. Biddable.”

  Maddox said nothing.

  “Knowing that you’d tried to hobble my mission from the outset,” Dev said, “got me thinking. What else might you have done? What other little tricks might you have been pulling?”

  Maddox sauntered back to his desk, casual as you please.

  “For instance,” Dev said, “it occurred to me that you’d deliberately selected a team of Marines to go with me who were perhaps not the best at their jobs. A bunch of duds.”

  “Sigursdottir was an excellent soldier,” Maddox snapped. “Milgrom too. All of them. How dare you suggest they weren’t.”

  “Oh, no, absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Ballsy as anything. I rejected the idea immediately. Then I got to thinking bigger. The bigger picture. A grander scheme.”

  Maddox sat down and began twirling one of the empty tumblers on the desktop with his forefinger.

  “Go on,” he said. “You’re clearly itching to tell me about this ‘grander scheme’ – some nonsense you’ve fabricated.”

  “You had a good war, didn’t you, Maddox? I remember you telling me that. Said you loved every minute of it. So what a comedown, to be stationed here, out in the back-end of beyond. Nothing to do all day but keep a watch on the Plussers’ comings and goings. No excitement. No challenge. Precious little likelihood of the combat you miss so much.”

  “You’re saying I concocted everything – the insurgency, the Ice King – because I was bored? Is that it? Do you have any idea how preposterous that sounds?”

  “Nothing to do with boredom. Love of war. That’s the motive. The desire to see hostilities between the Diaspora and Polis Plus reopened. An end to the truce so that we can start all that lovely fighting again.”

  Maddox’s eyes widened briefly, almost imperceptibly. There was something hungry in the micro-expression, a yearning.

  “I won’t deny that I find the present state of peace... uncomfortable,” he said. “The Frontier War was not settled conclusively. We didn’t lose, but neither did we win. The Plussers ought to have been annihilated. They were, and remain, an existential threat. What we have now – this uneasy détente – is neither fish nor fowl. A bit like you in that host form.”

  “‘Fish’ I’ll take, but ‘fowl’? That’s below the belt.” Dev chuckled, mostly because Maddox didn’t. “Look, captain, I’ll lay it on the line. I don’t reckon the Ice King was a Plusser construct after all.”

  “But you said it was. That’s a matter of record. It’s gone into my reports. In the informed opinion of an ISS operative, as stated in a commplant dialogue transcript, the huge sea beast was under the control of a Polis Plus sentience. Fact.”

  “You put me on the spot. I was saying that to keep you sweet, as much as anything.”

  “You still said it.”

  “And it wasn’t only what you wanted to hear, it was what you needed, so that you could confirm to your superiors that the Plussers had been killing humans and attempting to drive us off Triton. You were using me, like you used Handler. You got me to supply you with a piece of evidence, not much but just enough to make the case that Polis Plus have committed an act that contravenes the peace accord. There’s now a – what’s the Latin phrase? A casus belli. A legitimate reason to start a war, if anyone in TerCon wants to.”

  Maddox’s mouth creased into a slim smile. “This is an awfully complicated web you’re saying I’ve spun. Above all else, it implies that I could somehow, singlehandedly, stir up an insurgency.”

  “No. That was ongoing already. What you did was exploit it and bolster it, by introducing the Ice King. You gave the insurgents what they craved: a god to put the divine seal of approval on their actions.”

  “I made the Ice King? How?”

  “I admit, I was hoping you’d be able to answer that one for me. My best guess is you arranged to have an ordinary, innocent crab transformed by genetic manipulation, boosted to jumbo size.”

  “Easy to say, but do you know how one would go about doing that? Because I don’t. Do I look like a master scientist to you? These ribbon bars on my chest are medals, not PhDs.”

  “No,” said Dev. “Which leads me to an unwelcome conclusion. You’re not working alone. You’re not the prime mover, just a cog in a much larger machine.”

  “Hmmph.”

  Maddox stopped twirling the tumbler. His other hand, Dev noted, was out of sight. Down by one of the desk drawers, if he didn’t miss his guess.

  Dev tensed. The encounter was playing out as he’d expected, though not as he might have liked.

  “Well, I think I’ve heard enough,” Maddox said.

  “Enough as in I’m a crank and I’m spouting utter garbage and you want me to leave and never darken your door again?”

  “No,” said Maddox with a touch of world-weariness. “Enough as in you’ve figured out just the right amount to pose a danger.”

  A pistol appeared above the desk.

  “You come across as a smartmouthed dimwit, Harmer,” he said, cocking the gun, “but beneath the goofy exterior you’re shrewd. That’s a fairly neat piece of misdirection.”

  “As was your tumbler-twirling.”

  “Distracting you with one hand so you won’t observe what the other hand is up to. Cunning, eh? The question now is do I shoot you on the spot, or do I think of something cleverer?”

  “Shooting me on the spot isn’t your best option.”

  “You would say that.”

  “No. Think of the mess. The paperwork. You’d have to account to a lot of people for why you put a bullet in me.”

  “I could say you attacked me. I was defending myself.”


  “But why would I attack you? Why would I turn up at this base unarmed, let myself be brought to your quarters, all meek and obliging, and then just go nuts and launch myself at you? Also, why shoot me when you’re big enough and well-trained enough to incapacitate me bare-handed? It doesn’t hold up. It isn’t consistent.”

  “Which is the reason you’re not dead already. I mean, you’re a loose cannon, but not that loose. I’d have too much explaining to do.”

  “Yeah, the last thing you want right now is to look suspicious. You need to keep your nose super clean. If you killed me for no good reason after this whole Ice King business, someone might come sniffing around, asking awkward questions.”

  “Oh, I’m going to kill you all right, Harmer. Be under no illusion about that. You don’t get to walk away. It’s a case of where and when, that’s all.”

  “If you want a suggestion, there’s always –”

  “Outside, I think,” Maddox said. “That would be best.”

  “Outside. Just what I was going to say.”

  “By the water’s edge.”

  “Yes, because then you can dispose of the body easily. The sea will swallow the evidence.”

  “The sea, and what’s in the sea.”

  “Maybe I was trying to escape from you. You warned me you’d shoot if I ran, and I ignored you and ran, so you shot.”

  Maddox nodded approvingly. “Excellent. I like it. I was escorting you off the premises. You bolted – I don’t know why, you just did. It surprised me. I told you to come back or I’d shoot. You didn’t comply.”

  “Bang, and I plop into the water, never to be seen again.”

  “Much neater that way. Thanks for chipping in. I appreciate the input.”

  “I never thought I’d be collaborating in covering up my own murder.”

  “Peace makes strange bedfellows,” Maddox said. “Stranger even than war.” He gestured at the door with the gun. “Let’s go, shall we? Get this over with.”

  67

  THEY WALKED OUT into a brisk breeze and double moonlight. Captain Maddox kept the muzzle of the pistol snugged into Dev’s back, staying close to him to keep the gun out of sight. Witnesses would assume Maddox and Dev were simply out for a stroll.

  Not that there was anyone. It was late. The great majority of Station Ares’s Marines were in bed. And Maddox was familiar with the timing of patrols and their routes, and so was able to avoid them.

  “You can spill now, if you like,” Dev said. “About the Ice King. Where it came from. How it was made.”

  “Why should I? What difference will it make?”

  “To you? Not much. But to me, to satisfy my own personal curiosity...”

  Maddox deliberated. “Well, I can’t see that it’d do any harm. Given that five minutes from now you’re going to be fish food. The technology is remarkably compact. The starter pack, if you can call it that, is an oval thing not much bigger than a football. A manmade egg.”

  “Containing a crab embryo and a growth medium.”

  “Pretty much. I believe the design incorporates elements reverse-engineered from Plusser tech.”

  “But to turn an ordinary unborn crab into something of the Ice King’s proportions, you’d require a massive energy source. It would have to feed on something. A whole lot of something. And where would you hide it while it was growing to maturity?”

  “The answer to both questions is Triton’s core. It has an energy source in abundance: all that methane clathrate trapped in the ice.”

  “I see. You dump the ‘egg’ in the ocean, it sinks to the bottom, then it taps into the methane clathrate to power an accelerated exponential growth.”

  “Hey presto, in just a few weeks a giant crab is roaming the oceans. The moment the creature is large enough to fend for itself, the ‘egg’ untethers it, and off it goes, looking for food.”

  “The pressures on the ocean floor would crush almost any other species, but not a crustacean.”

  “Especially not one that’s been tweaked for extra hardiness.”

  “And you dropped this so-called starter pack in the sea yourself?”

  “I personally supervised an expedition to the Tropics of Lei Gong not long ago. We were on exercises. Routine stuff. All I had to do was slip out on deck one night, make sure no one was around, switch the device on and hoick it overboard.”

  “Who supplied it?” Dev asked. “That’s what enquiring minds really need to know.”

  “And that’s the one thing I cannot – will not – reveal. It’s more than my life’s worth.”

  “Oh, come on. Condemned man’s request. You can’t refuse.”

  “Seriously,” Maddox said. “It’s not going to happen.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “All I’m going to say is that there are bigger forces at work than you realise, Harmer. You’re right, I’m just a cog in a machine. But what a machine! Powerful interests, some of them much closer to home than you might think. Honestly, you have no idea.”

  It wasn’t just the night air that gave Dev goosebumps then.

  “You’re saying there’s some wider conspiracy at work,” he said. “This goes high up.”

  “You may infer that. I couldn’t possibly confirm or deny it.”

  “Someone important wants the peace accord to collapse. Someone wants us to go to war with the Plussers all over again.”

  “Is that so hard to believe?” said Maddox. “I’m not the only person who thinks that an enemy that hasn’t been totally eradicated is an enemy that hasn’t been defeated. Look at it the other way round. Do you imagine that Polis Plus doesn’t want the Diaspora gone? Do you think they’re not plotting our downfall even as we speak? Shouldn’t we be doing the same? That would be prudent at least.”

  “The war was as huge a drain on the Plussers’ resources as it was on ours. They suffered just as much as we did.”

  “Harmer, Harmer, Harmer. You’re not naïve. All these covert shenanigans, all this espionage – you assume it maintains balance, keeps order.”

  “It does.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It’s dress rehearsal, is what it is. Probing. Testing. Intelligence gathering. Preparation for the moment, the inevitable moment, when conflict is triggered again.”

  “Inevitable?”

  “Oh, yes. All these potential flashpoints you ISS people visit, these cloak-and-dagger schemes you foil... Don’t you see? Surely you do. They’re sparks from a flint, and sooner or later one of them is going to ignite the tinder-dry underbrush, and then...”

  “Then people like you are going to get the hit you’re jonesing for. Frontier War Two, the sequel. ‘This time it’s for keeps.’”

  Maddox snorted, half in amusement, half in contempt. “Joking to the end. I kind of admire you, Harmer. It’s almost as though you don’t appreciate how hopeless your position is.”

  They had arrived at the tip of one of the snowflake’s arms, beside the field gun emplacement. Waves lapped loudly at Station Ares’s structure. Triton’s two moons cast double shadows. Twin silhouettes stretched from Dev’s feet in a long V, one slightly less dark than the other.

  “Hopeless?” he said. “I’ve got a warmongering maniac with a gun in my back, just about to blow a hole in me and send me to a watery grave. I suppose that is more or less the definition of hopeless. If only I had some cunning get-out plan. An ace up my sleeve.”

  “But you don’t,” said Maddox, and then, a fraction less certainly: “Do you?”

  “I don’t appear to.”

  “Well then. The Ice King is now just an unhappy memory, a casualty of a phoney war, and you’re about to be next. Possibly, if nobody hears the gunshot, I won’t even have to make up an excuse about why I killed you. I’ll just tell anyone who asks that you came, we chatted, you left, I never saw or heard from you again. That’d be simpler, more conveni –”

  He broke off, his last word becoming a guttural huff of air, an involuntary exhalation. It was accompanied by a muffle
d crackling, the sound of a discharge of electricity.

  Maddox slumped to his knees, the pistol dropping from his hand with a clatter. Dev whirled round and scooped up the gun.

  There was a whiff of singed uniform fabric, and the scent of burning flesh. Maddox mouthed words at him silently, a look of incomprehension contorting his features.

  Behind him stood Xavier Handler, water sheeting off him, a Tritonian shock lance in his hands. Handler’s face was contorted too, in pure hatred.

  “You played me, you bastard,” he hissed. “Lied to me, made me your bitch. How does it feel, now that the tables have been turned? What’s it like to have someone stab you in the back?”

  “Technically that wasn’t a stab,” Dev pointed out. “That was a jolt.”

  “Oh, whatever,” said Handler. “Don’t ruin the moment for me.”

  Maddox tried to turn his head to look round, but his muscles wouldn’t function properly.

  “A second burst should do it,” Handler said. “The lance has recharged. I just want you to know, captain, that you screwed with the wrong person. You tried to kill me with that Sunbaker, kill all of us, as though we were just... just flies. A trivial annoyance. I – we – had done everything you wanted. Then we were surplus to requirements, and whoosh. Vaporisation. That’s how little other people’s lives matter to you, isn’t it? We’re only here for you to –”

  “Handler,” Dev cut in. “Xavier. Enough grandstanding. We can’t hang about. Someone might come. If you’re going to do it, do it.”

  Handler’s brow knitted. He wasn’t a natural born killer, or a soldier. He didn’t have the instinct or the training to take a life.

  What he did have was a grudge so powerful, it was overwhelming.

  The shock lance crackled again.

  Maddox juddered spastically, then keeled forward, flat on his face.

  Dead.

  Dev bent down, levered his arms under the corpse like the prongs of a forklift truck, and rolled Maddox into the sea.