World of Water (4 page)

She wore a tunic like a one-piece swimsuit made from a sort of leathery hide stitched together with cord and held in place by shell clasps. The scales that covered her skin were small, fine and pale pink, with a silvery sheen. Thin, wafting fins of the same colour ran down from the nape of her neck to the top of her spine and along the backs of her limbs.

At her breastbone was a raised design etched in her skin, a cutaway of a nautilus shell showing its logarithmic spiral and the chambers within. The keloid scarring was precise but pronounced. The detail of the design was exquisite. The pain it must have caused in the carving would have been exquisite too.

The weapon she bore was not a spear like the other’s. It looked more sophisticated, like a cross between a lance and a rifle, manufactured from a blend of organic materials. Coral for the handle and firing mechanism, something rigid yet pulpy for the rest.

She brandished it at Dev defensively, its tip level with his belly. Dev floated inert, wary, careful not to make any sudden movements. She seemed angry and he had no wish to antagonise her.

The other Tritonian swam over to join her. He was clad similarly but broader-shouldered, thicker-jawed – male. Slung over his shoulder was a sack made from strands of some sort of seaweed, plaited into a web. It held several dead fish.

Together, side by side, the pair of them surveyed Dev. Their eyes were round, black, lidless and inscrutable.

Dev did his best to thank them for saving him from the creature. After his brush with death his thoughts were in turmoil, his heart racing, but he tuned in to the gratitude he was feeling beneath it all. The emotion was sincere and he embraced it.

His face tingled, his cheeks especially. He wondered what colours were dancing across his skin. He hoped they meant what he thought they meant.

The Tritonians remained blank-faced, their eerie dark stares unwavering. It occurred to Dev that he had made an error of judgement. They might not communicate using bioluminescence. That or he had expressed himself incorrectly. Could be he had even insulted them by mistake.
Your mother’s a walrus
, something like that.

He resorted to dumb show, pointing downward to indicate the slain beast, then to himself, and finally patting his chest as though in relief and heartfelt appreciation.

Still no response from the Tritonians, and Dev felt like a prize chump.

They continued to face one another, Dev and the two indigenes, for another half-minute or so.

Then the Tritonians turned and slowly, solemnly, swam away. Dev watched them go until they became indistinct blurs, lost in the marine murk.

It was, he realised, his second ever encounter with a sentient alien species. At least, unlike every Plusser he had met, these two hadn’t been trying to kill him. Standoffish they might have been, but compared with Polis+ they were downright friendly.

7

“I
’M SORRY,
I
’M
sorry, I’m sorry.”

This from Handler as he helped Dev out of the water and back onto the platform of the ISS outpost at Tangaroa.

“A thalassoraptor,” he went on. “Only the most dangerous animal on the entire planet.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yes. The theory is it was one of the dominant land species back when Triton was a big ball of ice. It managed to adapt as the ice thawed over millennia, and became a sea dweller.”

“Fascinating.”

“Thalassoraptors rarely come this near the surface. Their usual haunt is the mesopelagic zone, about a thousand metres down. We were incredibly unlucky to bump into one.”

“We both survived the experience, that’s the main thing.” Dev slumped on the platform, glad to feel the warmth of the sun on his face and a solid structure beneath him. Glad also to revert to breathing the traditional way.

“By the skin of our teeth,” said Handler. “Last I saw of you, you were right behind me. When you didn’t emerge, I had no idea what had happened. I was terrified the thalassoraptor had got you.”

“It was a close-run thing.”

“I should have thought to take a repellent with us. A sonar pulser, an electric prod, something. Just in case. I’m so stupid.”

“Stop beating yourself up over it. We’re alive, aren’t we? And intact.”

“How did you get away from the thing? How on earth did you manage that?”

“I’d like to claim I scared it off with my aura of sheer hard-bastard-ness,” said Dev, “but in fact I had help.”

He explained about catching the thalassoraptor by the tail and about the Tritonians.

“That was a stroke of good fortune,” Handler said. “They must have been a hunting party. Doubtless there’s a drift cluster – one of their nomadic communities – within a few kilometres of here.”

“They were tooled up, that’s for sure. And the one who killed the thalassoraptor looked like he knew exactly what he was doing.”

“They’re a hardy, indomitable bunch, the Tritonians. They live every day surrounded by a thousand different marine species that would like to bite them or sting them or maul them to death, and they’re tough enough to cope. You mess with them at your peril.”

“I got that impression,” Dev said.

“They don’t like humans much, either. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d killed you as well.”

“I got that impression too. Seemed like they were trying to make up their minds about me and finally decided to let me off with a caution. I gave them the old flasheroo.” Dev waved a hand over his face. “But no dice.”

“It should have worked. That’s why I have that capability.”

“Yeah, I thought it was worth a shot. You’re some kind of diplomatic envoy, right? In addition to being an ISS liaison.”

Handler nodded. “That’s my main role here. I’m a go-between, employed to keep Diasporan–Tritonian relations amicable. ISS have me on retainer, but that’s a sideline. Most of the time I’m doing what I can to resolve disputes and convince everyone to play nice. Hence the amphibian adaptations and the subcutaneous photophores.”

“Photophores?”

“Light-emitting cells. Tritonians have them, of course. If the two you met didn’t answer back when you ‘spoke’ to them, it’s most likely because they didn’t want to.”

“I was getting the cold shoulder. The silent treatment.”

“Just so. It would be fair to say that the Tritonians have no great fondness for us.”

“Colonists land from outer space and occupy your world without your consent – what’s not to love?”

“Well, quite. The issues are pretty complex, actually, but there’s always been a general resentment from them towards us, right from the start, and it’s getting worse.”

“But those two saved me all the same. They could have just left me to become thalassoraptor chow.”

“Maybe you found a couple of compassionate ones,” said Handler. “How are you doing, anyway?”

Dev sat up. His clothes were already bone-dry. His headache, however, was returning.

“I could do with some grub,” he said, “and maybe some more painkillers. Otherwise, I’m fit as a fiddle and raring to go.”

“Good,” said Handler. “We’re on the clock, remember?”

“As if I could forget.”

“And we’ve some travelling ahead of us. Places to go, people to meet.”

“More Tritonians?”

“No. Humans.”

“That’s a relief. Simpler to deal with.”

“Not these ones.”

8

T
HE
R
ECKLESS
A
BANDON
skimmed across the wavetops at 150 knots.

Driven by twin thousand-horsepower super-charged turbine impellers, the jetboat went so fast and ploughed such a furrow in the water that the froth didn’t begin to subside until it was over the horizon. To Dev, standing at the aft rail looking back, the boat’s wake was a permanent, indelible white scar.

Handler was stationed up on the flybridge, keeping an eye on the autopilot. The
Reckless Abandon
was more or less sailing itself, but he was clearly the sort of person who liked to stay busy and be useful, or at least to make a show of it.

The journey from Tangaroa to Station Ares, the principal Diasporan military base on Triton, was scheduled to take five hours. Dev whiled some of that time trawling local insites and the ISS central office hub for facts about the planet.

Triton, it turned out, was one of the less-well-documented places in the known universe, if not the least. There was infinitely more information available about Neptune’s largest moon – also Triton – than there was about the planet. It was eclipsed in significance by its uninhabitable, uncolonised namesake.

Even its strategic value was downplayed, as though the presence here of Diasporan settlers and troops was a dirty secret, something no one really wanted to mention. Dev found a couple of blogs by radical peace activists campaigning for all humans to be withdrawn from Triton and relocated elsewhere, so as not to tweak the Plussers’ noses. Conversely, there were online interviews with hawkish politicians who demanded that the colonisation of the planet be stepped up, so as to keep the Plussers on their toes.

Aside from these fairly niche opinions, no one had much to say about it. Triton was in every sense a backwater. Gulf cruisers docked here almost never. The settlers were self-sufficient and left pretty much to their own devices.

Having done as much astropolitical homework as he was able to, Dev resorted to researching fauna. Triton’s boundless, all-covering ocean hosted an abundance of life, but only a tiny fraction of it could be seen from the deck of a boat. There were gigantic cinnamon-coloured cetaceans that rolled through the depths, breaching the surface just once an hour to breathe. There was the indigo bubble, a type of jellyfish that gathered in such vast numbers during their spawning periods that they formed temporary islands with circumferences of anything up to eight kilometres. There were tentacled squid-like things the size of tree trunks which jetted along just beneath the waves, raiding the sunlight zone for small fry – easy pickings – before returning with their bellies full to the abysses that were their home. Dev peered for them all, but in vain. Not even a glimpse.

This was not least because the
Reckless Abandon
made course corrections whenever its sonar picked up larger examples of the creatures, so as to avoid a collision. The jetboat itself was not small – some thirty metres from stem to stern, with a full load displacement of fifty tonnes – but the cetaceans, for instance, dwarfed it. An adult male of the species, which had been dubbed the redback whale, was half as long again as the boat and twice as heavy, and could be very aggressive towards anything he perceived as a competitor trying to horn in on his harem of females. In a contest, the
Reckless Abandon
would definitely come off worse.

Soon the sun – Beta Ophiuchi, to give it its proper designation – had begun to set. Two moons glimmered into view overhead as it sank. One was perfectly round, but the other had had a jagged-edged gouge eaten out of it and bore a halo of debris, evidence of some primordial cosmic impact.

According to one local insite, the two moons could play havoc with Triton’s tides and weather:

Sometimes, when they’re in close conjunction, their gravity differential fields conspire together and you can get a tidal range of up to ten metres. This is almost invariably accompanied by atmospheric disruption leading to powerful climate events. On the occasions when all three bodies are aligned, Triton and both moons, the phenomenon of the “syzygy storm” is not uncommon. That’s like a Terran hurricane, but magnified by a factor of ten. When one of those sets in you really have to batten down the hatches!

Dev doubted he would be here long enough to have to worry about any so-called syzygy storm. In just under seventy hours, succeed or fail, he would be zipping through ultraspace to his next host form, since the current one would have broken down catastrophically and be dissolving back into the protoplasmic goo it was conjured out of.