World of Water (36 page)

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...

Oh, we do,
said Dev.

Then you can count me in. I want to be there when it dies. Witness it with my own eyes, up close.

Trust me, you don’t want to be too close. The weapon we’ll be using – let’s just say the results are best seen from a distance. A considerable distance.

Fair enough.

What I still can’t work out is why the Ice King went for that drift cluster.

That puzzles me too. It seems so arbitrary. If it were just an animal, I might understand. But you claim it’s being controlled from the inside.

The drift cluster wasn’t by any chance a Nautilus Movement stronghold?
Dev hazarded.

Not to my knowledge, no. But even if it was, the Ice King didn’t seem to care if innocent bystanders got hurt. Children, for example.

Well, if what it did has cured a few insurgents of their religious fever, that’s something,
Dev said.
Now all we have to do is eradicate the source of the disease. The Ice King’s second coming is about to be cut short.

And good riddance,
the kid said, with feeling.

Ethel looked at him with surprise – and something that bore a more than passing resemblance to approval.

53

M
AZU
.

Last surviving Triangle Town.

Its domes and outlying marinas and algae farms rode the enormous sea swell. Each roller sent a ripple through it, making its various sections rise and fall in succession, from one end to the other. The bridges that linked them all canted up and down, hinges strained to the limit. The entire township resembled a caterpillar, flexing fluidly.

The storm was doing its level best to break Mazu apart, but so far the place was holding together.

Once the Ice King got here, that would all change.

It seemed that the manta sub, although it had travelled at less than maximum speed, had made good time. The
Admiral Winterbrook
was already on the scene, but of the Ice King there was no sign. Both vessels had beaten it to its destination.

Dev transferred from the sub to the catamaran, where the first thing he did was head for the bridge and brief Sigursdottir about the attack on the drift cluster and the ensuing game of cat and mouse which had led to him and Ethel hiding out in the deepest possible reaches of the ocean. Jiang, at the helm, listened in, and Milgrom entered shortly before he finished and caught the tail end of his summary.

“You’ve had yourself a morning,” Sigursdottir remarked.

“You can say that again.”

“Don’t mistake this frown on my face for sympathy, though. I’m not happy. Thanks to you, we lost track of the Ice King.”

“Temporarily.”

“Yeah, we lucked out. Picked it up again. But I thought the whole big idea was to keep tabs on it. That’s what we agreed on.”

“Ethel kind of scuppered that. Like I said, it killed a couple of her friends and she knew we’d be next if she didn’t do something drastic. She was also trying to help the people from the drift cluster. They might well have been next on the Ice King’s hit list.”

“Very noble.”

“Nice piece of buck-passing there,” said Milgrom, unwrapping a protein bar and taking a big bite. “Blame the sea monkey.”

“No,” said Dev. “I take full responsibility. For everything. But corporal, for what it’s worth, I’d be obliged if you didn’t call her a sea monkey.”

“Ahh, you’re sweet on the fish lady. That’s nice. You two going to spawn together, huh? Make thousands of nice little caviar babies?”

Dev was tired, irritable and hungry, and the sight of Milgrom munching on food, when his own energy levels were low and his stomach was growling, was pretty much the final straw. Insults and banter he could handle, but it felt as though she was eating in front of him solely in order to mock him.

“Go fuck yourself,” he said.

“Only way I can guarantee myself a decent lay,” Milgrom shot back with a smirk and carried on gnawing on the bar. “So, you must really like the taste of fish.”

“Seriously, shut up or I will shut you up.”

“You’re not man enough.”

“With all due respect, screw you.”

Milgrom took a step towards him. “‘Screw you’ I can take. But anyone who
with-all-due-respect
s me deserves a pasting.”

Dev’s hands balled into fists. It was neither the time nor the place to get into a scrap, but Milgrom was really rubbing him up the wrong way. A joke was a joke, but Ethel didn’t deserve the disrespect she was getting.

And that protein bar looked so delicious, too.

Sigursdottir moved between them as they eyeballed each other. “You two need to either have a punch-up or get a room. I can’t make up my mind which. But at this precise instant, you are both going to stand down and back off. The Ice King is still inbound and we have to decide on the best course of action. Gunnery Sergeant Jiang, how far away is it?”

Jiang checked the sonar screen. “Four klicks and closing. Not going too quickly. Looks kind of arrogant to me. Taking its time, like it knows Mazu’s a sitting duck.”

“I don’t need your interpretation of the thing’s psychology,” Sigursdottir snapped. She was under immense strain and trying, not wholly successfully, to keep it from showing. “Just the facts. How soon ’til contact?”

“Ten minutes tops.”

“Okay. I say we pull back to a safe distance. Let this play out as it will. There’s nothing we can do to stop Mazu getting clobbered. It’s strictly observe-and-report for us. Then, once the Ice King moves on, we resume pursuit duties until such time as the Sunbakers show up.”

“Which’ll be when?” Dev asked, shooting a surly glance at Milgrom, who shuttered her eyes at him sneeringly.

“They’re on their way aboard the
Astounding
. That’s a combat hydrofoil, fastest boat Station Ares has. Maddox is captaining it himself.”

“We’re honoured.”

“High priority. Also, nobody but himself has clearance to launch a Sunbaker. Current ETA is...” Sigursdottir looked to Jiang.

“Oh-four-hundred hours,” said Jiang. “A little under five hours from now. Could be longer, though. They’re going at flank speed, but they’ll lose headway if the storm gets any worse.”

“It could get
worse
?” said Dev, only half facetiously. The
Admiral Winterbrook
was seesawing from stem to stern and shuddering violently with every wave that crashed over its bows. The world outside was one mass of angry water, from the sea itself to the pelting rain.

“Syzygy storm,” said Milgrom. “Not for wimps.”

“Yes, it could get worse,” Sigursdottir said. “Winds haven’t yet topped hurricane force, and the meteorological satellites are predicting they might. Seventy per cent probability.”

“Wishing I hadn’t asked now,” Dev said. “All right, so we’re sacrificing Mazu to Crab Features. Shame, but as a wise man once said, ‘Sometimes you have to lose a town to gain a planet.’”

“Who said that?” Milgrom challenged. “I’ve never heard that before.”

“Actually I made it up. But it still applies. Now, just out of curiosity, where’s Handler?”

“Last I saw of him,” said Sigursdottir, “he went off to bunk down in one of the communal cabins.”

“He’s been keeping a low profile,” said Milgrom. “Think all the excitement’s been getting too much for him, poor lamb.”

“Just head down and aft,” said Sigursdottir. “You’ll find him. Don’t be long, though, or you’ll miss the show.”

“I only want a word or two,” Dev said.

“Sounds ominous.”

“Hopefully it won’t have to be.”

54

“D
OWN AND AFT
” meant negotiating a narrow companionway down from the bridge to an even narrower corridor on the lower deck. The staircase underfoot pitched and yawed as the boat rocked.

The first cabin door Dev tried, he disturbed Reyes and Cully, the diving team, catching some shuteye in bunks fitted with form-hugging intellifoam mattresses. Reyes had some very uncomplimentary things to say about him intruding on their slumber after they’d been up half the night on watch duty, and Dev backed out with an apology.

The second door he tried, the bunks were empty, but Blunt and Francis were on the floor, lying on their sides in sixty-nine position. They were going at it hammer and tongs, clothing askew, eyes shut, heads pecking, tongues flicking, so into each other that they didn’t even register Dev’s presence. All that talk about the handsome Master Chief Reynolds earlier, he mused as he glided the door shut. Private Blunt and Private Francis were wherever-you-can-take-it women, it seemed. Any port in a storm.