World of Water (26 page)

Dozens of the plaited vines of bladderwrack crawled over the gunwales, probing their way onto the lower deck. The
Admiral Winterbrook
was in the same predicament, entwined all around in a questing, squirming mesh of seaweedy growth.

Milgrom leapt from the seat of the point-defence gun and began slashing away with a shimmerknife. A couple of other Marines came out on deck to help her, but it was hopeless. For every vine they severed, another slithered up to take its place.

Dev pulled out his HVP as a tendril of the bladderwrack began climbing the ladder to the flybridge.

“Wait!” Handler cried. “You’ll damage the boat.”

“I think the boat has more to be worried about than a hole from a sabot round. So do we.”

“Sorry. You’re right. Fire away.”

Dev blasted the encroaching twist of seaweed in two, also managing to blow out a chunk of deck.

It made very little difference, however. The severed vine fell away but the stump carried on regardless, worming its blunt tip up the rungs and wrapping offshoots of itself around the handrails for added support.

“Shit,” said Dev. “This is not going to work.”

The
Reckless Abandon
lurched under them. The bladderwrack had a firm stranglehold on the boat and was lashing further vines around it and flexing them ever tighter.

“I think it wants to pull us under,” Handler gasped.

“I think you’re right.”

“What are we going to do? Tell me you have an idea, Harmer. Please! Tell me there’s a way out of this.”

Dev’s mind had gone blank. He couldn’t think of anything. The
Reckless Abandon
was listing rearwards. The bladderwrack was everywhere, glistening strands of it all over the boat, driving through doorways into the cabins.

He and Handler couldn’t simply jump overboard. He doubted they would last long once they landed in that oozy morass of stems and air sacs. They would be mired, sucked down, suffocated.

What about crossing over to the
Admiral Winterbrook
somehow? The Marine catamaran was still level in the water.

He doubted it would last much longer, however. Only a matter of time before the bladderwrack covered it too. And they couldn’t reach it anyway. The gap between it and the
Reckless Abandon
was a good five metres, too wide to leap.

They were screwed.

Both boats were as good as lost.

Unless...

38

“H
ANDLER,
” D
EV SAID,
“where’s the fuel tank on this thing?”

“Just aft of amidships.”

“Port or starboard?”

“Both. One on either side.”

“Below or above the waterline?”

“Just above.”

Dev leaned out from the flybridge and fired several rounds into the side of the boat in a diagonal line.

All the shots punched ragged gouges but it was the last three that actually drew blood, as it were. Liquid methane spurted out in a trio of clear, jetting streams. The fuel spread quickly, dispersing to form a viscous, iridescent layer across the water and the bladderwrack.

The sentient seaweed recoiled, evidently finding the methane noxious. Not noxious enough, however, to release the
Reckless Abandon
. If anything, the plant seemed peeved that someone was trying to poison it. The vines redoubled their efforts to drag the jetboat down.

“So much for that plan,” Handler said, on the verge of despair. “All you’ve done is piss it off.”

“I’m not finished yet.”

Dev had in fact been hoping that the fuel spill would drive the bladderwrack away. Since it had failed in that aim, he had no choice but to resort to Plan B, something a little more drastic.

“Handler, listen to me. We’re going to have to jump ship.”

“Abandon the
Reckless Abandon
?”

“Afraid so.”

“But you said it would be suicide to –”

“I know what I said, but circumstances have changed. We have a shot at getting through this, but the price is you’re going to have to kiss your boat goodbye.”

Handler groaned.

“It’s fucked anyway,” Dev said brusquely. “But it can at least buy us a chance to get clear, and maybe save the
Admiral Winterbrook
into the bargain.”

“You’re going to scuttle it?”

“In a manner of speaking. Wait just a second.”

Sigursdottir, does that point-defence gun of yours have incendiary ammo?

We can load some. Why?

See the fuel pouring out of the
Reckless Abandon
?

Gotcha. Say no more. What’s the timescale? How long do you need?

How long’s it going to take to load that ammo?

No more than thirty seconds.

Then that’s our timescale.

He disconnected the commplant call, only to find that Handler had quit the flybridge. The ISS liaison was scooting down the ladder, taking care not to touch the wreathing, writhing bladderwrack.

“Where the fuck are you going?” Dev shouted.

“Your nucleotide shots,” Handler called back. “I have to get them.”

“Oh, you...”

Dev bit back a curse and flew down the ladder after him. Handler ducked into the main cabin, stepping over the vines that now infested the floor. Dev followed.

In the confined space the bladderwrack’s stench was repulsive, rotten as well as briny. The vines had fastened themselves to anything that was fixed in place, wrapping around the bulkheads, the bolted-down seats, the table legs, every projection and fitting. If Dev and Handler stood still even for just a few seconds, the bladderwrack would latch on to them too.

“Handler, this is the worst possible moment for heroics.”

“I just need to...”

Handler was grappling with a cupboard door, unpicking the vine holding it shut.

Dev, after a brief inner debate, went over to assist. Together they managed to tear the vine loose from the door handle.

Inside the cupboard lay the shockproof metallic case that stored the serum patches. Handler grabbed it, and he and Dev raced back out on deck.

Dev didn’t know how much time they had lost. More than they could reasonably afford, he reckoned.

The
Admiral Winterbrook
’s point-defence gun was swivelling, coming to bear. Fuel was still gushing from the
Reckless Abandon
’s perforated tank. The slick it had created across the top of the bladderwrack was now some sixty or so metres in diameter, and still growing. The air above the slick was shimmering as the methane, released from the pressurised containment that kept it cooled and liquefied, began to evaporate.

“Come on!”

Dev grasped Handler by the scruff of the neck and hauled him up the sloping deck to the bows.

“If this works, we should get an opening to dive in.”

“‘If’? ‘Should’?”

“Give me a break. I make these things up on the fly. Desperate measures are never an exact science.”

The gun began blazing. Nitroamine explosive rounds raked the methane slick, and in a flash, the sea was on fire.

The bladderwrack collectively convulsed, the entire expanse of seaweed responding as one. It churned and roiled.

“You’ve hurt it!” Handler crowed, exuberant.

“I don’t think so. I don’t think it can feel pain the way you or I do. But it’s smart enough to know it doesn’t want to burn.”

The vines interlaced around the
Reckless Abandon
were no longer clinging to it quite so tenaciously. In the water, the bladderwrack was breaking up. It less of a dense knotted mass and more of a loose agglomeration.

This was the best – the only – opportunity Dev and Handler were going to get.

Dev threw Handler off the front of the
Reckless Abandon
. The ISS liaison plunged into the midst of the bladderwrack, clutching the case of serum patches to his chest. Dev was right beside him.

Not a moment too soon, either, as the flames on the sea found the source of the liquid methane. One of the
Reckless Abandon
’s fuel tanks, then the other, went up. The entire jetboat rose clear of the water as it exploded, and when it came back down it was in two pieces, broken in the middle like a snapped branch.

Dev heard, saw and felt the explosion, a burst of brilliance behind and above him, even as he clawed down through the coils of bladderwrack, pulling Handler along. He ignored the slap and clench of the vegetation, focusing solely on pressing onwards, getting to the bottom of it and out.

How deep was this matted mess of seaweed anyway? How far down did you have to go to be free of it?

It looked as though he might never find out, because the bladderwrack began to coalesce around him and Handler. The seaweed had detected the presence of the two humans, intruders. Even disorientated by the fire raging on the surface, it still remembered its job was to seek and destroy.

Dev felt strands of it reaching for him, groping for purchase. He could barely see. Everything was a field of ravelling, snaky brown plant matter.

Then he and Handler were snarled in it, snared. They could no longer move. Up, down, in every direction, the bladderwrack crowded in on them, stifling, crushing.

The more Dev struggled against it, the firmer its python-like embrace became.

It was going for his neck.

It was determined to clamp his gills shut.

And there was nothing he could do to stop it.

39

H
E FELT A
push from below, a surging rush.

Then he and Handler were rising, as though a giant cupped hand was lifting them.

Dev glimpsed the outline of a huge rounded rectangle below, like a hole coming up to swallow them.

Which was exactly what it was.

Ethel, you fishy beauty.

The rectangle was the mouth of a manta sub – Ethel’s, it had to be – and it engulfed them, scooping them up inside as the vessel ascended vertically at speed. The sub was ploughing a path to the surface through the bladderwrack, taking Dev and Handler with it.

Dev deftly hooked an elbow over the rim of the manta’s mouth, keeping a tight grip on Handler with his other hand. The sub’s incursion had torn them free from the bladderwrack’s grasp, but fronds of the seaweed were still battering them and twisting around them as they rose. He clung on grimly against the onslaught.

Then, all at once, they were soaring into the air. The manta sub shot up like a rocket, five, ten, fifteen metres clear of the sea, shedding bits of bladderwrack as it went.

Reaching apogee, the manta turned with its wings outstretched and began a surprisingly graceful descent. It didn’t fall so much as glide, several tons of sea beast coming down at a low angle and hitting the water with a hefty but controlled wallop, a bellyflop mitigated by the mattress of bladderwrack the sub landed on.

All the same, the two humans in its mouth were nearly jolted free. Only by hanging on for dear life was Dev able to keep himself and Handler from being ejected like morsels of bad food.

The manta sub had come to rest not far from the
Admiral Winterbrook
and the shattered, sinking wreck of the
Reckless Abandon
. Fire burned across a swathe of the sea, and for a moment Dev thought he and Handler had been saved from the bladderwrack only to face a worse fate. The manta sub was surely stranded, helpless. How could it burrow back down through the seaweed without a run-up to achieve the same impetus it had used in its ascent? And the flames were spreading...

But he had underestimated both Ethel and her vessel.

The manta sub started to rock and shudder. It seemed to be floundering, thrashing about in panic.

No.

It was moving.

It was using its wings to propel itself across the bladderwrack, lurching forward like an elephant seal on dry land. There was nothing elegant about the procedure. It was a cumbersome lollop, demanding a huge amount of effort and achieving very little. The sub wasn’t getting anywhere fast.