World of Water (46 page)

“I don’t appear to.”

“Well then. The Ice King is now just an unhappy memory, a casualty of a phoney war, and you’re about to be next. Possibly, if nobody hears the gunshot, I won’t even have to make up an excuse about why I killed you. I’ll just tell anyone who asks that you came, we chatted, you left, I never saw or heard from you again. That’d be simpler, more conveni –”

He broke off, his last word becoming a guttural huff of air, an involuntary exhalation. It was accompanied by a muffled crackling, the sound of a discharge of electricity.

Maddox slumped to his knees, the pistol dropping from his hand with a clatter. Dev whirled round and scooped up the gun.

There was a whiff of singed uniform fabric, and the scent of burning flesh. Maddox mouthed words at him silently, a look of incomprehension contorting his features.

Behind him stood Xavier Handler, water sheeting off him, a Tritonian shock lance in his hands. Handler’s face was contorted too, in pure hatred.

“You played me, you bastard,” he hissed. “Lied to me, made me your bitch. How does it feel, now that the tables have been turned? What’s it like to have someone stab
you
in the back?”

“Technically that wasn’t a stab,” Dev pointed out. “That was a jolt.”

“Oh, what
ever
,” said Handler. “Don’t ruin the moment for me.”

Maddox tried to turn his head to look round, but his muscles wouldn’t function properly.

“A second burst should do it,” Handler said. “The lance has recharged. I just want you to know, captain, that you screwed with the wrong person. You tried to kill me with that Sunbaker, kill all of us, as though we were just... just flies. A trivial annoyance. I – we – had done everything you wanted. Then we were surplus to requirements, and
whoosh
. Vaporisation. That’s how little other people’s lives matter to you, isn’t it? We’re only here for you to –”

“Handler,” Dev cut in. “Xavier. Enough grandstanding. We can’t hang about. Someone might come. If you’re going to do it, do it.”

Handler’s brow knitted. He wasn’t a natural born killer, or a soldier. He didn’t have the instinct or the training to take a life.

What he did have was a grudge so powerful, it was overwhelming.

The shock lance crackled again.

Maddox juddered spastically, then keeled forward, flat on his face.

Dead.

Dev bent down, levered his arms under the corpse like the prongs of a forklift truck, and rolled Maddox into the sea.

He went in with barely a splash, and swiftly sank.

Dev tossed the pistol in after him.

Handler was breathing hard, almost hyper-ventilating. His eyes were starkly wide, his legs trembling.

“Good work,” Dev reassured him. “Maddox was a scumbag. You’ve done us all a favour.”

“I know, but...”

“Don’t even think about it. It’s over. Great timing, too. I swear he was seconds away from pulling the trigger. I was beginning to worry you weren’t going to make it.”

“No, I was shadowing the pair of you underwater, just like you said. Keeping you in sight. The only problem came when I was climbing out. I was terrified he’d hear me.”

“You were the king of stealth.”

With a sudden horrified shudder Handler tossed the shock lance aside, into the water.

“I never want to do that again.”

“With luck, you’ll never have to.”

“What was it all about, Harmer? The Ice King, Maddox, everything. What have we been up against? What’s it all been in aid of?”

“You’re better off not knowing,” Dev replied, with feeling. “Even I’m not sure what to put in my final report to ISS – what to include, what to leave out. There’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye. I think I’m going to have to be pretty careful what I say to who. As are you.”

Maddox:
Powerful interests, some of them much closer to home than you might think
.

“If you insist,” Handler said.

“I do. I believe, now, that it wasn’t Maddox who tampered with the growth vat at all. Or if it was, he had inside help.”

“You don’t mean me?”

“Of course not.”

“Someone else in ISS?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. That’s why we need to watch our step.”

“You don’t have to worry about me on that score,” Handler said with finality. “I’m out. I’ve had enough.” He looked at the patch of water where Dev had consigned Maddox’s body. “There’s no coming back from what I’ve just done. I don’t belong in the Diaspora anymore.”

“That’s pretty extreme. What are you going to do? Where are you going to go?”

“After I’ve helped you data ’port out, I’m going to try my luck with the Tritonians. Join one of their communities. If they’ll take me.”

“Really?”

I prefer their honesty,
Handler said in Tritonese.
Duplicity doesn’t suit me.

You know what?
Dev replied.
I don’t think that’s the worst decision you could make.

And if I can help keep ungilled–Tritonian relations sweet from their side rather than ours, so much the better.

You’ve found your calling. Good luck with that.

“Meanwhile,” Dev added in normal speech, “we’d better scram, before someone starts wondering where Maddox has got to and comes looking for him.”

Handler nodded, and they both dived.

Ethel was waiting a kilometre away in her manta sub. Then it would be back to Tangaroa and time to data ’port out to wherever Dev was next assigned to visit.

Somewhere dry, he hoped. He’d had enough of being drenched and sodden to last a lifetime.

68

1000000101001001111010
Ninth Extrasolar Engineers
1111100101001100010100100110010100011100101001011

01010111000010101010111111011110001010110111101011111010111101100111111
Leather Hill
11001010101000101

101001
the war against the digimentalists is not over
11100001001011111000011111101111001010
a little closer to your thousand
10001010010111001101101110001101111110010101000110101011111001011
Robinson D in the Ophiuchus constellation, also known as Triton
11101111110111111110100101001001010001100

you make a difference
00100011101110100010100000111000111101010101110000000000111010001010111001011
powerful interests
1101011100010100011

“And where the fuck am I now?” were the first words out of Dev’s mouth, even before the ache of the data ’porting hangover could set in. “If there’s so much as a puddle on this planet, I am out.”

The response was crisp laughter. Female laughter.

“You couldn’t be anywhere much drier,” the woman said. “PearlTwo.”

“PearlTwo?”

“Gas giant. Owned and run by –”

“The Orb Consortium.” Dev sat up on the mediplinth. Absently, he touched his neck, checking with his fingertips. No gills. Just the solid, unfissured flesh of a Terratypical neck. No webbing between his fingers, either.

Small mercies.

“That’s right. I’m Belinda Tell. Your liaison.”

“Of course you are.”

She was tall, thin, with a face so chiselled and angular it was almost a polygon.

“This is a holiday resort,” Dev said. “I know that much. Playground for the rich and famous, and the wannabe rich and famous. What am I needed here for? We’re nowhere
near
the Border Wall. The Plussers can’t have a presence. There’s got to have been some mistake. Maybe I got diverted somewhere in ultraspace. I’ve been installed in the wrong host form.”

Belinda Tell shrugged. “You are Dev Harmer, is that correct?”

“As far as I can remember. I feel like I’ve been dozens of different people, dozens of different models, but yes, that’s the chassis number.”

“Then there hasn’t been any mistake. You’re where you’re scheduled to be.”

There was a window. Dev saw clouds – long sunlit streaks of them, in layers both above and below, with a pocket of clear air in between. He detected a faint vibration all around him. He was aboard an airborne vessel, not quite in motion. Hovering. At altitude.

Outside, a man in a wingsuit glided by, fabric stretched taut between his arms and legs, like the wings on a flying squirrel. A third panel between the man’s calves acted as an airfoil, providing extra stabilisation.

A half-dozen other wingsuited people arrowed past, all with broad, exhilarated grins curving beneath their eye goggles.

PearlTwo.

A pleasure planet. Adventure and luxury, in one expensive bundle. Safe thrills galore.

Nothing bad happened in a place like this.

Did it?

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the Facebook brains trust of Marc Francis, Paul Simpson, Jonathan Morgantini and Adam Baker for helping me out with a couple of weapons-tech ideas when I was stumped. On that same score, no thanks at all to Julian Beck, Debbie McMahon, Kit Reed and Stephanie Thorne, who did their best to derail the highly cerebral hive-mind thinking process with frivolous suggestions...

Thanks, too, to Jake Murray for another storming book cover, turning an almost impossible brief into a thing of beauty.

Look out for Book 3,
World Of Air
,

coming soon...

WORLD OF FIRE!

Dev Harmer, reluctant agent of Interstellar Security Solutions, wakes up in a newly cloned host body on the planet Alighieri, ready for action. An infernal world, so close to its sun that its surface is regularly baked to 1,000°C, hot enough to turn rock to lava. But deep underground there are networks of tunnels connecting colonies of miners who dig for the precious Helium-3.

Polis+, the AI race who are humankind’s great galactic rivals, want to claim the planet’s mineral wealth for their own. All that stands between them and this goal is Dev. But as well as Polis+’s agents, there are giant moleworms to contend with, and a spate of mysterious earthquakes, and the perils of the surface where a man can be burned to cinders if he gets caught unprotected on the day side....

‘One of the SF scene’s most interesting, challenging and adventurous authors.’

Saxon Bullock,
SFX Magazine
on
The Age of Ra

‘Possibly Lovegrove’s best yet... Once again James Lovegrove has subverted and exceeded expectations.’

SF Signal
on
Age of Shiva

‘5 out of 5. I found myself unable to put it down, and plan to reread it soon.’

Geek Syndicate
on
Age of Aztec