World of Water (5 page)

His mission.

Earlier, just after they had put out to sea from Tangaroa, Handler had given Dev a mission briefing, sketching out the details.

In certain regions of the planet, the Tritonians were in open revolt. There had been clashes between them and settlers, and some bloodshed.

At first it had been sporadic, random skirmishes, one here, another there. Sabotage, mostly. A boat hull holed while it was in dock. A fish ranch fence broken. A desalination plant vandalised. A trawler’s net split open at the bottom so that its catch spilled out. Regrettable but understandable, the sort of friction that tended to occur when two very different cultures butted up against each other. The settlers had adopted the sensible tactic of turning a blind eye and waiting for the Tritonians to get bored and give up.

But the attacks had increased in frequency and ferocity. There had been abductions, and the drowned bodies of the abductees had turned up shortly afterwards, sometimes gruesomely mutilated. A xeno-ichthyologist had vanished while out on a solo specimen-gathering expedition, never to be seen again. The pontoons on a private habitat had been destroyed, causing the whole unit to sink, with the loss of a dozen lives, an entire extended family.

It was a pattern of escalation and mounting aggression, with the settlers responding in kind. Someone had dropped a homemade depth charge on a Tritonian drift cluster. A posse of scuba-diving humans armed with spearguns had ambushed an indigene hunting party, killing two and badly injuring three others. And those were just the incidents that were public knowledge. There were surely countless others that had never got reported.

You didn’t need to be a genius to foresee where all this was headed. The mutual hostility would keep on growing, the violence spiralling, until settler and Tritonian were engaged in full-scale, widespread war.

Was Polis+ responsible for the unrest? Was there a Plusser agitator working behind the scenes, stoking the fires of grievance among the Tritonians, prompting this previously passive race to rise up and fight? Was it all a cunning plot to oust the Diaspora from a world which was too close to their territory for comfort?

Handler didn’t know, and neither did Dev. Someone in TerCon must think so, though, since ISS had been contracted to send in an operative.

Dev and Handler’s primary goal was securing a military escort from Station Ares. Then they would need firepower, Handler insisted, and reinforcements. Because they were headed right into the thick of the unrest.

Dev reflected on the nature of the task ahead. It was the usual mishmash of nebulous intel and impending disaster. He wondered if this was how ISS treated all its operatives, bunging them out into the field to fumble their way to a solution, or if it was a policy they reserved specially for him.

Probably not. He was nothing special. He had been selected for this particular mission since he was available and in closest proximity, that was all. Luck of the draw. The short straw.

But then every straw was short when you were an indentured employee of Interstellar Security Solutions.

Dev was working for the company because he had no choice. Technically he did not exist. He had no body to call his own. He was an itinerant consciousness, a being of pure data that ISS could transmit wherever they liked, wherever they decreed he should go.

His true body had been all but destroyed on the battlefield during the Frontier War. ISS had promised to build him another one, good as new. The condition was that he would first serve as one of their agents. An entire human body, grown from scratch, was not cheap. He could never normally have afforded one; only the fabulously wealthy could. ISS had offered him the option of earning one.

All he had to do was hit his quota of a thousand points.

It was a system of payment by instalments, a scheme based on notional credits which ISS could dole out or take away as they saw fit. Dev was awarded points according to the outcome of his missions. The more resounding the success, the greater the number of points he would receive. Failures and excessive collateral damage incurred deductions.

Once he hit the magic one thousand mark, his debt to ISS would be discharged. A pristine new body, an exact copy of the original Dev Harmer, would be his. Dev would be free to be himself again – literally.

Until then, he was just so much space flotsam, fetching up in trouble spots and flashpoints, fighting fires before they could burn out of control.

Beta Ophiuchi was making its last gasp, melting into the horizon. It was an aged star, past the hydrogen fusion phase of its life, now burning helium to carbon at its core. The name the ancient Arabic astronomers had given it was Cebalrai, meaning ‘sheepdog.’ Dev imagined a tired old hound, worn out from years of hard labour, lapsing into a rickety, arthritic senescence.

He could empathise.

Onward the
Reckless Abandon
went, beating a path through unending sea. Though it was a well-designed vessel, with a plethora of active stabilisation technologies such as gyroscopically-controlled hull fins and self-regulating smartfluid internal anti-roll ballast tanks, the continual sine wave motion of its passage took its toll on Dev. His host form, it seemed, was a swimmer but no sailor; good
under
the water but not
on
it. The perpetual nagging headache didn’t help, nor the buzz in his ears that now accompanied it.

He went below decks, slapped on a seasickness patch from the first aid cabinet, and found a cabin to lie down in. He drifted halfway between sleep and wakefulness until a commplant call from Handler roused him.

We’re approaching Station Ares. Ten klicks out.

Be right there.

“I’ve messaged ahead,” Handler said as Dev scaled the ladder to the flybridge. “They should be expecting us.”

It was fully dark now. The sonar scope indicated a sizeable bulk, due west. It was getting nearer, but Dev could see nothing through the windscreen except tar-black ocean and a myriad of constellations.

“Haven’t they heard of lights?” he said.

“Station Ares is a low-profile structure. No part of it rises more than four metres above sea level. You won’t be able to see it with the naked eye until we’re virtually on top of it.”

There was a sudden, low
whump
, like a huge, distant door slamming.

“What was that?” Handler said.

Dev knew. He recognised, all too well, the sound of an artillery shell being fired.

“Get down!” he cried, and when Handler, startled, didn’t budge, he grabbed him in a bearhug and fell with him to the deck.

The air shrieked.

The sea exploded.

9

T
HE DETONATION OF
the shell, just a few metres off the bow, sent a spray of water over the entire boat. The
Reckless Abandon
rocked and wallowed crazily.

Dev, his ears ringing, reached up to the control console and groped for the button to disengage the autopilot, then hauled back on the throttle. The boat slowed.

“What are you doing?” Handler demanded. “We’ll be dead in the water. A sitting duck.”

“And if we keep going, they’ll take us for hostiles and hit us.”

“They’re already trying to hit us.”

“No, they’re not. If they’d wanted us sunk, we’d be sinking already. That was a warning shot.”

“So we’re not going to take evasive action?”

“No. You’re going to boot up your commplant and tell whoever’s in charge here that we’re ISS and we come in peace.”

The fog of panic on Handler’s face cleared. Unlike Dev, he had never come under fire before. It was a new and terrifying experience for him. Dev’s words cut through the fear.

“Yes. All right. Of course.”

His eyes lost focus as he accessed his commplant. Dev, meanwhile, scanned ahead, looking out for the telltale flash of a shell exiting a barrel. He hoped he was right about the warning shot. If not, then by now the artillery piece’s targeting guidance system would have a solid fix on the boat. The first shell might have been a near-miss. The next would be a dead cert.

“Through yet?”

Handler shook his head. “Connections are slow on Triton. We have about half the number of communications relay satellites a planet this size needs.” He raised a finger. “Hold on. I think I’m... Yes.”

There followed a conversation between Handler and someone at Station Ares which Dev was not privy to. His only clue to its content was Handler’s face, which ran the gamut of expressions from anxious to indignant to relieved. At the end of it, the ISS liaison looked up and gave a broad smile.

“Phew,” he said.

“I like ‘phew.’”

“It was all a misunderstanding, apparently.”

“
That
was a misunderstanding? I’d hate to see what they do when they’re really confused.”

“The base is on high alert. Someone on watch got over-keen. We’re safe to go in and dock now.”

Handler piloted the boat cautiously for the remaining few kilometres, sticking to a gentle, unthreatening speed. Eventually, Station Ares came into view, a long, low block of blackness studded with lights. As the
Reckless Abandon
drew closer, Dev got an impression of its shape: a hexagonal axis with six radial arms, each subdividing into branches and tipped with a field gun.

A standard pop-up offshore naval base, the kind which could be airdropped in kit form and assembled on site in under a week and which was known colloquially as a ‘snowflake.’ Depending on requirements, it could be configured to provide dockage for a flotilla of medium-sized warships or accommodation for as many as eight companies of Marines.

Station Ares appeared to have plumped for the half-and-half option, its facilities equally divided between dorms and marinas. Dev counted a dozen ships in all, from corvettes to nippy little fast-attack craft. All sported the chiselled, angular design that minimised radar cross-section almost to zero.

A gunboat had been launched to greet the
Reckless Abandon
, stabbing the darkness with a searchlight.

“Ahoy, there,” said an amplified voice. “Follow us in.”

The gunboat spun about, and Handler trailed obediently after it.

They moored and disembarked, to be met by a welcoming committee of three Marines. The highest-ranking was First Lieutenant Sigursdottir, who snapped them a salute that was crisp, curt and, because they were civilians, just that little bit contemptuous.

“You have permission to come aboard Station Ares, gentlemen,” she said. “Apologies for firing on you just now. You were zooming in fast and we’re a mite defensive at the moment. It’s a good thing you saw sense and halted. If you hadn’t, we might have blown you out of the water.”

“Itchy trigger fingers, huh?” said Dev.

“Afraid so. The situation on Triton being as it is, we’re in a shoot-first-ask-questions-later frame of mind.”

Sigursdottir was no more than a metre and a half tall, but somehow made up for it with an erect bearing, as though she felt there was no one she couldn’t see eye-to-eye with. She had classic Nordic features – lofty cheekbones, narrow eyes, ash-blonde hair – and her sea-camo battledress barely disguised the bulges of a powerful, athletic physique. Like many a Marine, she looked as though she could bench-press her own bodyweight without breaking a sweat.

Dev was ever so slightly smitten.

“If you’ll walk this way...”

He and Handler fell in behind Sigursdottir, who marched them to the snowflake’s axis at a fast lick. The other two Marines took the rear, carrying their rifles in their hands rather than slung over their shoulders.

This spoke to Dev about the general nervousness at the base as loudly as the artillery shell had. A pair of unarmed and apparently harmless friendlies were being treated with the same protocols as captive enemy combatants. He imagined that were he and Handler to step out of line, they might expect a bullet in the face. Or, just as likely, in the back.

They entered a building that, like every other one on the base, was single-storey and as featureless as any bunker. They passed communications rooms where staff sat cradled in padded lounge chairs. These people seemed to be staring off into the middle distance, but unless Dev was very much mistaken, they were uplinked via commplant to radar arrays, data-collecting buoys and geostationary observation satellites all over Triton, monitoring the planet for security purposes. There were a few floatscreens for general use, if imagery needed to be shared and communally examined. Otherwise the work was done inside people’s heads.

At the epicentre of Station Ares lay the office of Captain Arkady Maddox. It was a bare space with no windows and not much in the way of ornamentation beyond a TerCon Marine flag on the wall and a floatscreen gif gallery of significant moments in the occupant’s life, which seemed to consist entirely of parades and medal presentation ceremonies.

The man in charge of every Marine on Triton was in his mid-fifties, with hair the colour of iron and a grin that revealed teeth like ivory tombstones. Dev recognised in him the hardbitten, highly-decorated top-brass type he had come across countless times during the war, a gruff outward bonhomie masking a harsh, aggressive nature. His handshake was crushingly strong, less a greeting than a test of character.