World of Water (15 page)

“At least we might be able to salvage
something
from this fiasco,” she had said.

Handler had taken a little more convincing, and Dev had had to remind him that he was answerable to Dev, not the other way round, so canvassing his opinion was more a courtesy than anything. Handler acknowledged this and said that as long as he himself didn’t have to go back to Llyr, he supposed he was okay with the idea.

“Spoken like the truly sensible person you are,” Dev had said, adding, “I’m toying with Can Handle Himself In A Fight as a nickname. How about that?”

“Bit of a mouthful,” Handler had replied, “but it’s the best you’ve come up with so far.”

Triton’s twin moons were rising as the URIB bounded across the waves, retracing the course the two bigger boats had just travelled. The collision-damaged one, designated Luna A, was the larger of the satellites but also the more distant. Its intact counterpart, Luna B, was smaller but nearer. By some quirk of astrophysics, their orbits positioned them so that they appeared to be of identical size when viewed from the planet’s surface. Set close together, they gazed down from the sky like a pair of pearly, cataracted eyes.

The moons’ light lent the sea an opalescent dazzle, while the URIB’s wake shimmered a sparkling green as the boat’s progress disturbed the bioluminescent phytoplankton. Soon, manmade illumination was added to the mix: the lights of Llyr, harsh yellow and white against the night sky.

Reyes slowed the URIB to a crawl.

“Close enough?” she asked.

“It’ll do,” Dev replied. “Don’t want anyone spotting us.”

“We’ll hang back here. You get in a jam, send out a call and we’ll come running. Otherwise we’ll wait, and you can RV with us when you’re done.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

“Don’t leave it too long,” said Cully. “Reyes’s conversation gets very boring very quickly.”

“Hey!”

“And she has a tendency to nod off during recces and stakeouts.”

“No, that’s you.”

“Only because you’re so dull you send me to sleep.”

Dev tuned out their banter, focusing on Llyr. About four klicks, he estimated. Shouldn’t be a problem, as long as his body played ball. Since the outbreak of hives earlier, there hadn’t been any fresh symptoms of decay – no more bleeding, no further rashes. Dev felt slightly dizzy, but that was all, and it might be nothing more than mild seasickness. Handler had offered him a nucleotide top-up before he left, but there hadn’t been time to fit it in. He would have it when he returned.

With a farewell nod to the two Marines, Dev dived overboard.

The sea rumbled around him as he swam. The further he got from the URIB, the more he became aware of a plethora of marine sounds. The water was not silent. It was alive with noises – a cacophony of clickings, moans, shrill keening ululations. They came from unseen creatures communicating across distances or finding their way through the darkness by echolocation. Dev felt like he was crossing a crowded bar.

Then there were the visible signs of life, no less plentiful. Lights flashed far below him, flickers of brilliance in every colour of the rainbow. These belonged to the inhabitants of the benthic zone, that realm of perpetual night, and it was like soaring high above a fireworks display, a welter of pulsing fluorescence.

In the shallows, meanwhile, myriad fauna surrounded him – finned things, soft things, cartilaginous things, shelled things, top-lit by moonglow and starshine. Some were hideous, with snaggle teeth or vampiric fangs or lifeless jet-black eyes set beneath beetling brows. Others were fascinating and beautiful, crowned with flowing fairytale fronds or elaborate horny growths, like something a child might dream up. Others still were drab and nondescript, shoals of matt-grey small fry as alike as peas.

Not knowing which species were dangerous and which weren’t, but not wanting to take any chances, Dev gave them all a wide berth. Any creatures that didn’t dart out of his way as he approached, he diverted around or swam under.

He was glad of the HVP at his hip, especially when something large and streamlined loomed up beside him and kept pace with him for a while. It was at least three metres long from its pointed nose to its sickle-shaped tail and it moved with the purposeful ease of a shark. It seemed curious about him but never strayed closer than about thirty metres, so that he couldn’t get a clear view of it, only glimpses of a murky silhouette.

Eventually the big fish lost interest and swam off, but Dev remained on his guard for several minutes after. The beast might still be shadowing him, just from a greater range. He wasn’t taking anything for granted, not in this relentlessly deadly ocean.

From time to time he popped his head above the surface in order to re-establish his bearings. Llyr’s domes, with their jewelling of lights, drew ever nearer.

He reached his destination twenty minutes after leaving the URIB. Having studied a local insite map of the township beforehand, Dev had identified a number of possible targets, but the simplest and most straightforward was an artificial beach, a narrow shelf of sand that sloped down to the waterline. A huge, fine-meshed cage extended around it into the sea, creating a lido that was safe for recreational bathing.

Dev slithered over the pontoons marking the outer rim of the cage and glided through wavelets to the beach, which was deserted except for a couple sharing a smoke. They were young, in their mid-teens.

As he padded across the sand towards them, he caught a bitterly aromatic scent wafting to him on the breeze. He immediately recognised it as cannablast – ordinary marijuana cross-spliced with vroomshroom, a psychotropic fungus found on the forested planet Tau Ceti E.

Even though vroomshroom had not been shown to have any long-lasting side effects and the high it produced, while acute, was only short-lived, it was still classified as a class-A drug, meaning cannablast was borderline illegal.

Dev suppressed a smile.

Good for these kids.

Good for him, too.

They didn’t notice him until he was almost on top of them. The boy made a half-hearted, ham-fisted attempt to hide the joint, masking it inside his cupped palm, while the girl stared up at Dev, frowning in puzzlement. They were both pretty stoned. Their eyes shone glassily in the moonlight.

“Are you...?” the girl said. “What
are
you? You’re a bit like... but you’re not.”

“You must be that dude,” said the boy croakily. “The one who represents us to the Tritonians. Our whatchemacall – ambassador. Right?”

He had mistaken Dev for Handler, which was understandable. As far as most settlers knew, there was only one amphibious human on the planet.

“Shit, you’re not here to bust us, are you?” The girl’s expression turned fraught. “Oh, man, Ty, I said we shouldn’t smoke outside. I told you. I knew someone would catch us.”

The boy called Ty said, “He’s not anybody with any, like, legal power. He can’t arrest us. Can you, mister?”

“No,” said Dev.

“See, Aletha? Relax.”

“You grow that yourself?” Dev asked, gesturing to the poorly concealed joint.

Shy pride lit up Ty’s face. “Yup. Got a mini hydroponics lab set up in my cupboard at home. Seeds cost a fortune, but worth it. I mean, what else are you going to do to pass the time out here? I don’t even want to
be
on this shit hole. It’s a pimple on the butt-end of the galaxy.”

“Yeah,” said Aletha, “but Dad thought it’d be an adventure for us. Get away from it all in the back of beyond. Live off the land, so to speak. A new start after our mother waltzed off with her zero-gee yoga instructor.”

Brother and sister, Dev realised. Not boyfriend and girlfriend.

“So he’s off farming kelp all day, happy as a pig in shit,” said Ty. “Only good thing for me and Aletha is he’s too busy to keep tabs on us.”

“He’s got a girlfriend, too, so he’s kind of distracted,” Aletha added. “As long as he doesn’t get an alert from TerCon Curriculum that we’ve fallen behind with our schoolwork, we’re pretty much left to our own devices.”

“Okay,” Dev said. “Well, here’s the deal. I should report you to the authorities for cultivation and possession of a controlled substance. Difficult for me not to, really, since as an ambassador I’m sort of the authorities myself.”

Their faces fell.

“But you could do me a favour instead, and in return I won’t breathe a word to anyone.”

“Name it,” Ty and Aletha said, practically in unison.

“I have reason to believe that people in Llyr are keeping a Tritonian imprisoned.”

The two kids exchanged looks.

“I haven’t heard about any –” Ty began, but Dev cut him off.

“Don’t try bullshitting me. Everyone in town knows about it, including you. A Tritonian, a male, probably around your age, got taken captive by some fishermen a few days ago. He’s somewhere here, and I’d like to know where.”

It was partly bluff. Dev wasn’t 100% certain.

But he remembered how Gutting Knife had broken off mid-sentence when describing how he had dealt with the Tritonian who boarded his boat:
Yeah, and he paid for it. He’s still...
And he had lamely corrected himself:
He paid for it all right. That’s all I have to say.

He’s still paying for it
. That was what he was going to say.

And if the Tritonian was “still paying for it,” that implied he was in Llyr, being held against his will and most likely abused. Which would explain the townspeople’s collective antsiness when a squad of Marines had turned up. They’d thought someone had squealed and the military had come to investigate.

“I haven’t got all night,” Dev insisted. “You might as well come clean.”

Ty and Aletha looked truly intimidated, and he hated playing the bullying, mean-spirited establishment figure with them. He understood exactly how they felt: trapped on Triton, thousands of light years from anywhere worth being, bored, resentful, craving some kind – any kind – of escape. He’d known a young man just like them, fond of narcotics and resentful of parents and officialdom. He had
been
that young man, and there were words for the way he was acting now and the kindest of them was hypocrisy.

“Well...” said Ty defeatedly. “All I’ve heard is rumours. Word is they’re keeping him somewhere in town, but I genuinely, sincerely don’t know where. I’d say if I did.”

“Your best bet is to try the Moot,” said Aletha.

“The Moot? What’s that?”

“It’s like a bar and town hall, both at once. Place where the adults go to get drunk and have these long rambling debates about town politics and such. Air grievances. Blow off steam. Mostly so they can enjoy the sound of their own voices.”

“Closest thing Llyr’s got to a law court and a town council,” said Ty. “Someone there will have more information than we do. Bound to.”

“I can’t just go up to random strangers and ask questions,” said Dev. “I’m not exactly inconspicuous.”

“Sorry. It’s all I can suggest.”

Dev sighed. “So where do I find this Moot? Save me looking it up on a map.”

“Main dome,” said Aletha. “Right in the middle. This time of evening, they’ll be getting started. All you need to do is follow the sound of people arguing. You can’t miss it.”

“Okay. One last thing. That hooded top you’ve got on, Ty. Mind if I take it?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Not really.”

“Am I going to see it again?”

“Frankly, not likely. But you’re a good kid, and you know what’s being done to that Tritonian is wrong. Helping me, even in a small way, is helping him.”

Nodding, but still reluctant, Ty parted with the top. “Control buttons on the left cuff, if you need them. The fabric can waterproof itself, and thicken and release heat if things turn chilly. Hood’s got three settings: full, half, and snood.”

Dev slipped the top on. “Look, I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t give a shit about that joint. Go for it. Get cannablasted. Have some fun. And if you can figure out a way of leaving Triton any time soon, do. Hop a gulf cruiser, get the fuck out, and go and live someplace decent, somewhere with a bit of excitement. Somewhere
you
want to be and where you’re wanted.”

Ty and Aletha gaped at him.

“I mean it. Take it from someone who’s been there. Been you. Screw your dad and his midlife crisis and his back-to-nature crap. You’re smart, both of you, and you deserve better than this.”

Dev strode off, hitting the button that raised the hood to full, so that his face would be shrouded from sight.

As the hood telescoped up around his head, he heard Aletha say to her brother, “Who
was
that guy?”

Ty replied, “The voice of truth, sis,” and took a long, hissing toke on the joint. “The voice of truth.”

23

L
LYR’S MAIN DOME
offered a few Terratypical home comforts, after a fashion. There was an area of parkland, with threadbare grass and a handful of sad, stunted trees. There was an attempt at a shopping mall, a two-tiered gallery of stores selling clothes, knickknacks, kitchenware and dried goods. There was a nightclub made out of three standard habitat cubes shoved together, and next to that, a strip club called Venus In A Shell.