World of Water (37 page)

Third door, paydirt. Handler occupied a berth above Private Fakhouri, the comms specialist. She was lying on her back, arms folded behind her head, with the coma stare of someone watching or listening to entertainment.

Handler, by contrast, was in a semi-doze, and was startled – to say the least – when Dev grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out of the bunk and into the corridor.

“What the – ? Who the – ? What – ?” he spluttered. “Harmer! What are you doing? What is this?”

Dev slammed him against the wall, forearm to throat, pinning him in place.

“No time for niceties,” he said. “Straightforward question. Give me a straightforward answer, and maybe this’ll go okay. The nucleotide shots. What are they really?”

“I don’t know what you’re –”

“Wrong! You had your chance, blew it. Now we do this the hard way.”

“Harmer, have you gone mad? Help! Someone help!”

Fakhouri emerged from the cabin just as Dev was about to frogmarch Handler off down the corridor.

“Hold on,” she said. “What’s all the fuss? Where are you taking him?”

“ISS business, Private Fakhouri,” Dev said. “This is between me and Handler. Nothing to concern you.”

“Harmer’s assaulting me,” Handler remonstrated. “For no reason whatsoever.”

“No reason?” said Dev. “All right then. How about this? Do you believe in a supreme being?”

“What?”

“Do you believe in an afterlife? Do you live comforted by the falsehood that, when you pass on, your soul becomes subsumed into the Singularity?”

“Where is all this coming from?”

“How does it make you feel when I tell you that on Earth, during the Enlightenment, we began to treat religious fundamentalism as a mental illness?”

Handler blinked in disbelief. “You have got to be joking. You’re using the Provocation Sequence test questions on me? You’re trying to out me as a Plusser?
Me?
”

“How does it make you feel,” Dev persisted, “when I deny your fantasy god? Does it make you angry? Does it offend you down to your so-called soul?”

“Look into my eyes,” Handler said. “Look deep. Are these the eyes of a Plusser? Do you see Uncanny Valley in them?”

“Hard to tell, with those extra lids.”

“The extra lids don’t make any difference.” The ISS liaison let out a high-pitched laugh with a touch of hysteria in it. “I can’t believe you honestly suspect me of being a digimentalist in disguise. How ridiculous.”

“Well, if you
aren’t
Polis Plus, maybe you’re working for them without knowing it.”

“Hypnagogic exposure, you mean? They’ve brainwashed me into doing their bidding? You’re really reaching now, Harmer. Can this get any more absurd? Next you’ll be claiming I’m collaborating with the insurgency.”

“Had crossed my mind.”

“What’s brought on all these accusations? The serum, yes? Because you think it’s made you unwell? We’ve been over that. You were unwell when you started.”

“What if that’s because you gave me one of those shots
before
I came round on the mediplinth?” Dev said.

Handler tried to dismiss the suggestion with a sigh, as though he had never in his life heard something so implausible.

But there was a fraction of a second’s delay before the sigh came out. The tiniest of hesitations.

Bingo.

Dev knew, then and there, that he had hit the nail on the head.

“How would I ever know?” he went on. “Why would I suspect? There’d be no evidence. The microneedle patches don’t leave a mark on the skin. Not a trace to show that you’d already pumped me with a few millilitres of whatever it is that’s been fucking my host form up.”

“Wild speculation.”

Dev shoved Handler against the wall again. “Then how come I haven’t felt better since coming to Triton than I do now, hours since my last dose?”

“If you ask me,” Handler said in slightly strangulated tones, because Dev’s forearm was once more pressing on his windpipe, “the irrational behaviour you’re exhibiting is precisely because you
haven’t
been keeping up with the nucleotide shots. Your brain is starting to go. Could be there’s some intracranial bleeding you’re unaware of. It’s affecting your cognitive processes, making you think that insane things are true.”

Briefly, for a fleeting instant, Dev felt that what Handler was saying was possible. It made a kind of sense. All of this – his suspicions about Handler, the aggression he was feeling towards him, the way he’d let Milgrom get under his skin a short while earlier – was just the newest manifestation of his host form’s gradual decline. His mind was growing unstable, a kind of dementia setting in. What if the final, irreversible breakdown of his body had started? His brain could be turning to Swiss cheese inside his skull, driving him to madness, and he simply didn’t realise.

No.

“No,” he said. “Nice try, though. You almost had me. Now come on.” He yanked Handler away from the wall. “I know just how to get you to talk, and you won’t be able to lie.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. We can prove it either way by getting you outside and underwater. We speak in Tritonese, and there’s no way you can pull any shit on me. Tritonians always tell the truth, remember? They can’t help themselves.”

Handler let out a bleat of protest, and at the same time Fakhouri drew her sidearm – standard Marine-issue polymer-frame 9mm automatic, with a magazine full of self-steering fragmentation rounds and a DNA-coded grip to prevent it being wielded by anyone except the rightful user. She aimed it at Dev.

“Stop,” she said. “I’m not completely clear what’s going on here, but you, Harmer, are threatening that man, and I can’t let you do that. Not on a Marine boat, under Marine command.”

“Fakhouri, please,” said Dev, “put the gun away. I appreciate you think you’re doing the right thing. You’re not.”

Reyes and Cully were now out in the corridor too, drawn by the ruckus. Cully’s hand stole towards her own sidearm, while Reyes positioned herself beside Fakhouri’s shoulder, a gesture of solidarity and support. She had her colleague’s back.

“He fully intends to hurt me,” Handler said. “You’ve seen him. The man’s a loose cannon. You need to pacify him.”

“And you,” said Dev, “are a treacherous sack of shit who’s been undermining my mission from the very beginning, and I’m going to find out why.”

“Treacherous sack of – !”

“And conniving. Tell them, Handler, how you’ve been spying on us on Captain Maddox’s behalf.”

“Spying on ‘us,’ Harmer? Spying on
you
, maybe. Why would Maddox ask me to keep an eye on his own troops? Especially when he’s in regular contact with Lieutenant Sigursdottir.”

“An ISS liaison in cahoots with a senior military officer – that’s not standard operating procedure.”

“We’re not in cahoots,” said Handler. “I’ve just been acting as an extra pair of eyes for him. In fact, you might say, thanks to my association with Maddox, that I could be considered an honorary Marine.”

It was a blatant attempt to appeal to Fakhouri, Reyes and Cully and, to Dev’s dismay, it worked.

“You should let him go,” Reyes said to Dev. “I’m sure we can sort it all out like mature adults, without anybody hitting anybody.”

“Yeah,” said Cully. “You seem like a good guy, Harmer. I think we’re all a bit overwrought. If you’d just calm down...”

“Handler said Harmer might have something wrong with his brain,” said Fakhouri. “Something about medicine he has or hasn’t been taking, if I’ve been following the conversation correctly.”

“Medicine?” said Cully.

“That’s just a bluff,” Dev said. “Handler’s trying to do a number on me. And on you.”

“Your word against his,” said Reyes.

“Why don’t I put this hypervelocity pistol against his head?” Dev said, nodding down at his own hip. “Then we’ll see whose word we can rely on.”

“Don’t even think about it,” said Fakhouri, sighting down the gun barrel at Dev and tightening her index finger to achieve first pressure on the trigger. Her legs were braced apart, knees softened to absorb the rocking motion of the catamaran and keep her upper body steady. The expert stance of someone trained to use a firearm on a boat in high seas. “You’re going to let go of him, and then we’re going to walk up to the bridge, nice and slow, and we’re going to talk things through in front of Lieutenant Sigursdottir in a civilised manner, and that way nobody gets a dirty great hole in them.”

Dev weighed up the options: trying to disarm Fakhouri, going for his own gun, swinging Handler round to use as a human shield, or simply surrendering. None of them seemed particularly beneficial or appealing.

He very much didn’t want to get into a shooting match with the Marines. He would in all likelihood come off worst, since he didn’t have a drawn weapon and Fakhouri did. Plus, there were three of them and only one of him. More to the point, they were all supposed to be on the same side.

He didn’t want to surrender either, because then he would have lost control of the situation, for the time being at least. Who knew when he would get another crack at Handler? The ISS liaison was aware that Dev was wise to him now and wouldn’t let himself be collared so easily again. He might even beg protection from Sigursdottir, so that Dev would find it difficult getting another chance to interrogate him.

“Harmer,” said Fakhouri. “I’m waiting. Haven’t got all day.”

Then Jiang’s voice sounded over the
Admiral Winterbrook
’s PA system.

“All hands to the bridge. I repeat, all hands to the bridge. Contact imminent. Report fully prepped, armed and armoured. This is not a drill.”

Fakhouri, Reyes and Cully exchanged glances.

“You two go get kitted out,” Fakhouri said. “I’ll keep the ISS contingent covered. Then you can escort them upstairs while I get ready myself.”

“Affirmative,” sad Reyes. “Cully, you heard the woman. Double time. Let’s hustle.”

Fakhouri held Dev at gunpoint and Dev in turn kept Handler pinned to the wall, and this uneasy tableau remained in effect until Reyes and Cully returned from the boat’s armoury in full battle gear.

Blunt and Francis appeared too – clothing straightened, hair a little mussed – and that was when Dev finally had to admit defeat. He took his arm away from Handler’s neck with a grunt of frustration. Handler managed to look affronted and peeved, but there was also a twinkle of vindication in his eyes that could have been taken, if you were looking for it, as a sign of guilt.

Reyes and Cully took charge of both Dev and Handler and bundled them up to the bridge...

...where, amid the rollercoaster ups and downs of the waves, they had ringside seats for the Ice King’s attack on Mazu.

55

E
XCEPT THE
I
CE
King
didn’t
attack Mazu.

The gargantuan crab circled the township, seeming cautious, unconvinced. Again and again it poked its face speculatively above the surging waves, as though something about Mazu struck it as not quite right, as though it was looking for something that wasn’t there.

“What’s it up to?” said Jiang.

“Suspicious and unimpressed,” said Milgrom. “Like a dog sniffing at its bowl. ‘Kibble
again?
’”

Sigursdottir was torn between watching the Ice King and wanting to know why Reyes and Cully were treating Dev and Handler like captive prisoners.

“Explain,” she said, drawing an index finger back and forth in the air to indicate the two non-Marines. “What’s up with the ISS guys? They under arrest?”

That was when Fakhouri made her entrance.

“They were having a row,” she said. “It got heated. I cooled it down.”

“A row about...?”

Dev glanced sidelong at Handler. It took every ounce of self-control he had in him to say, “A misunderstanding. Handler and I have conflicting views on a certain set of facts. You know how it is.”

“No, I don’t know how it is, and what’s more, I don’t care. Have you settled your differences?”

“Yes,” said Handler firmly.

“No,” said Dev. Then: “Yes.”

“That’s what I want to hear. I will not tolerate squabbling on my boat, not from my men and not from civilians. You, Harmer, seem to be going out of your way to antagonise people today. You’d better stow that shit, or else. We don’t have a brig on the
Winterbrook
but we’ve got a galley you wouldn’t like to be shut up inside. Place is a health hazard.”

“Message received and understood.”

“Now, if you don’t mind, I’d rather pay attention to what matters, which is that freakazoid crab monster out there.”

Sigursdottir turned back to the windows, which were under siege from sheeting torrents of seawater and rain, so much so that the ultrasonic inducer field that was supposed to be keeping the glass clear and dry couldn’t cope.

The Ice King was still giving Mazu a wary once-over.

“Maybe it always does this,” Blunt said. “Checks out the opposition before going in for the kill.”

“That’s not what it did when it attacked the drift cluster earlier,” Dev said. “It barely thought twice.”

“So what’s different about Mazu?” Jiang wondered.