World of Water (31 page)

The kid floated to the floor of the room and lay there on his side, passive in his bonds.

He was thinking.

As far as Dev was concerned, that was an encouraging start.

45

M
AZU SEEMED TO
be the next stop on the Ice King’s itinerary. The gargantuan crab was certainly heading in the right direction, maintaining a roughly south-easterly course.

To Dev this was proof – not conclusive proof but near enough – that his theory about the Ice King was correct. It wasn’t marauding at random. It had purpose.

That surely indicated that the consciousness of a Polis+ agent had been installed in the creature, just as had occurred with the giant moleworm on Alighieri. The Plusser’s sentience was now infused into the network of ganglia that served as the crab’s brain, and was firmly in command, like the driver at the wheel of a juggernaut.

Opochtli had been just the latest on the hit list. Mazu would follow, and the Ice King would keep on going, systematically and methodically decimating townships and accumulating worshippers with every fresh conquest until it had an entire regiment of devotees in its thrall. Insurgents everywhere would draw inspiration from it, take heart from its example. Their ranks would keep swelling, new recruits would keep flooding in, until eventually the uprising achieved critical mass and all-out war erupted between indigenes and humans.

Dev could imagine Polis+’s Mainframe Council rubbing their hands with jubilation over that.

All this, of course, was assuming the Ice King was allowed to continue its rampage unchecked. Those Sunbakers couldn’t arrive soon enough, as far as Dev was concerned.

Onward the Ice King swam, Mazu-bound

Then a drift cluster came into view.

The Tritonian town floated at a depth of some two hundred metres, borne along by the prevailing current at a sedate, stately speed.

It resembled, more than anything else, a papier-mâché model of some complex molecule. Spheres of varying sizes were linked together by a lattice of spokes, fashioned from the spinal columns of redback whales.

The spheres themselves were lumpy agglomerations of coral, cultivated to give them windows, doorways and occasional long towers which served as tethering posts for living submarines. Bioluminescent lighting twinkled both indoors and out, giving the spheres the look of ghostly mobile constellations.

Each sphere, Dev reckoned, could comfortably house a hundred residents. They were gnarled, globular apartment blocks.

He could see that the Diasporan settlements on the surface had been built deliberately to mimic the design of a drift cluster. It was clearly the most practical way to organise habitation, both on and under the sea.

Of the two kinds of architecture on this world, human and Tritonian, Dev knew which he preferred. The drift cluster was just as functional as Tangaroa, Llyr, even Station Ares, but it had an eerie, otherworldly beauty too. It was an undersea fantasy of organic materials, constructed from things that had once had life or still had a life, not a single squared-off corner or smooth contour to be seen, hand-crafted and rough-hewn, fairytale, enchanting.

Cunning, also. Though large and sturdy and weighing many tons, the drift cluster had neutral buoyancy. Between the porous coral and bone, and their broad distribution, the drift cluster was far lighter than it appeared, yet still heavy enough to remain submerged at a consistent depth. It was poised perpetually, elegantly, between rising like a bubble and sinking like a stone.

It glided towards the Ice King, moving north-westerly; their paths set to converge.

The Ice King detected its approach and, as Dev would have expected, made moves to divert around it. The subs following the Ice King did likewise, tiddlers emulating the parent fish.

The drift cluster, after all, was home to Tritonians. It was not a lair of the hated humans. The Plusser agent within the Ice King had no reason to attack members of the insurgents’ own race. A wise god doesn’t alienate his worshippers.

Consternation reigned at the drift cluster nonetheless. Like panicked ants from an anthill, the inhabitants emerged in their droves. Some came out to gawp, some to flee, and some to wave weapons at the passing titan. These valiant defenders must have realised that knives, shock lances and tusk spears would be useless against so vast a beast, but better to brandish something than nothing at all.

The Ice King swam on, serenely aloof and unconcerned. The drift cluster trembled in its wake, but was not affected by its close encounter with a god.

But then...

On a whim, or so it seemed, the Ice King turned.

It’s coming back
, said Ethel.
Why is it coming back?

The behemoth sidled up to the Tritonian town, both practically the same size as each other. Its eyes, huge but beady, flicked back and forth beneath the beetling brow of its upper carapace. It was appraising the drift cluster, curious, almost quizzical, as though it was trying to make up its mind about something.

Then, without further ado, it struck.

An immense pincer came crashing down, cracking open one of the drift cluster’s spheres as though it were an egg. Dev could imagine how the Ice King had done exactly the same to the domes of Dakuwaqa and Opochtli, rearing out of the water to pound the townships mercilessly with its claws.

A score of Tritonians were hurled from the shattered sphere, spilling out like the candy in some horrendous piñata. Most swam away in terror, but a few simply floated, stunned insensible, or worse.

The Ice King slammed its other pincer onto the next sphere along, with the same results. The drift cluster shuddered and lurched. The bone spoke joining the two spheres fractured into its individual vertebrae.

Just about every Tritonian in the town scattered. The mass exodus spread in all directions except towards the Ice King. Dev saw adults herding small children before them and carrying infants in their arms; others dragged along the elderly, infirm and injured.

A handful of stalwart defenders remained, and some of these swam down to unfasten a large, tightly-meshed net that was attached to one of the lower spheres.

The net floated free and, from captivity, a large clump of vegetation unfurled. It was bladderwrack, the same stuff that had snarled up the
Reckless Abandon
and the
Admiral Winterbrook
just off Dakuwaqa.

The Tritonians prodded it with shock lances, goading it away from the drift cluster and towards the Ice King. The bladderwrack obediently went on the attack, extending several tangles of fronds out to the monster, trying to ensnare its limbs.

The Ice King made short work of it. The bladderwrack did its best, but the gargantuan crab tore the mass of sentient plant matter apart as though it were candyfloss. The drift cluster’s main deterrent became, under the Ice King’s snipping, slashing pincers, just so much shredded detritus.

The Ice King turned back to the drift cluster and began hammering it again with gusto. Dev was reminded of an infant, brutally and cheerfully dismantling a toy. Outer walls of coral, painstakingly trained in the desired shapes, collapsed into jagged fragments and clouds of powder. The honeycombed architecture inside was laid bare – chambers, tunnels, concourses – itself reduced to smithereens by further tremendous, scything swipes of the Ice King’s claws.

It wasn’t until the drift cluster was half wrecked that the true artistry of its design became clear. The entire structure began to wallow from side to side, like something in great pain. Then, all at once, the remaining unbroken sections split from one another. The spokes disintegrated. Some of the intact spheres started to rise, while others plummeted. A perfect balance had been catastrophically disrupted.

The whole extraordinary artefact fell to pieces, leaving the Ice King chasing the unbroken spheres, batting at them before they could get away from it.

The monster tired of the game pretty quickly and decided instead to eat a few of the drift cluster’s submarines. The zombie creatures were still attached by ropes to an intact tethering pylon, which was reeling through the water in pirouetting freefall. The Ice King wrenched subs off it and shoved them into its mouth one after another, gobbling down a whole smorgasbord of species, following fish with cetacean and cetacean with cephalopod and cephalopod with giant mutant tadpole thing.

Hope you get a bellyache
, Dev thought.

He was seething with anger, an anger stoked by helplessness and inadequacy. At that moment, all he could do – all anyone could do – was look on from the sidelines while the Ice King pursued its campaign of wanton demolition and slaughter. Until Marines from Station Ares brought those Sunbakers, there was no other choice. The only weapon available to him was the hypervelocity pistol, whose sabot rounds would have been as much use against the God Beneath the Sea as spitballs.

He did have the presence of mind to wonder why the Ice King had turned on the very people it was supposed to be liberating. Had its Plusser puppetmaster made a mistake? Had attacking the drift cluster been a tactical aberration? A technical glitch? Or was there some motive behind the action that he couldn’t as yet discern? Did it serve some wider purpose?

Even as Dev was pondering these questions, Ethel abruptly bent the steering stalks as far forward as they would go. The manta sub beat its wings hard, accelerating from stationary to top speed.

The other manta was galvanised into action, its pilots loyally copying Ethel and falling in step beside her sub.

We’re going to help some of these people, right?
Dev said.
The ones with children, maybe? Let them hitch a ride with us?

Ethel barely glanced at him out of the corner of her eye.
No. There’s no point saving only a handful of them, not when they’re all at risk.

What are you proposing?

What do you think?

You’re not seriously –

But she was.

The manta subs were making directly for the Ice King.

46

D
EV GAPED IN
disbelief.

Whoa there!
he said.
Stop! Now!

The glare of his demand was reflected on Ethel’s skin, a super-bright yell. She couldn’t have failed to see it. She ignored him nonetheless.

He thrust himself into her eyeline.

What are you hoping to achieve? A pair of manta subs against that thing? It eats vessels like these for breakfast. Literally. I’ve just seen it.

Move
, Ethel snapped, pushing him aside.

You’re going to get us all killed.

You don’t strike me as someone who’s frightened of dying.

I’m not – not if it’s worthwhile. But I’m against pointlessly throwing my life away. It’s a policy of mine.

I have no intention of pointlessly throwing my life away, or yours, or anyone’s.

Well, you’re doing a fairly good impression of someone who’s about to.

You need to trust me.

I don’t know you well enough to trust you.

Then you might as well make yourself useful instead.

How?

By shutting up, for starters
, Ethel said.
Also, by going to the other cockpit.

You want me out of the way, huh?

No, you ungilled ignoramus. Most submarines work better if there are two people in charge, especially when there’s danger involved. I want you to co-pilot this thing with me.

Co-pilot...?

A sub is more responsive if two people are operating the control columns in unison. When it receives commands from both, it accepts them better and processes them faster. And for what I have in mind, this manta’s going to need a lot of persuading and every bit of agility we can coax from it.