World of Water (21 page)

31

S
UPERSIZED SEA CREATURES
clashed in a tumult of lashing tentacles, threshing tails and snapping jaws. Dev almost forgot that these were submarines, steered by pilots. The giant beasts seemed simply to be doing what came naturally, instinctively: competing with rival species, employing the arsenal of weapons and defensive measures which evolution, that great quartermaster, had equipped them with.

The moray eel sub lunged at the seahorse sub, mouth open wide to reveal rows of backward-hooking teeth. The seahorse danced agilely aside, avoiding the eel’s rippling serpentine rush. With its prehensile tail it caught hold of its assailant just behind the gills. The eel arced its head round but couldn’t reach its target. It began turning in circles, but as long as the seahorse kept its grip and hung on, the eel could not sink its teeth in.

The swordfish sub went for the anglerfish sub, slashing at it with its long, sharp-edged bill. The anglerfish tried to bite back, but the bony blade was moving too fast. Its fierce sweeps drove the anglerfish back and opened up cuts in its flanks and belly. The anglerfish couldn’t get close enough to bring its fangs to bear.

The other manta sub, the one not piloted by Ethel, engaged with the pufferfish sub. Although the manta dwarfed the pufferfish, it had trouble utilising that advantage. Whenever it swooped in, the pufferfish inflated like a balloon, projecting an array of stiff spines that could pierce the thickest hide. The manta veered away each time, aborting the attack to avoid injury.

As for Ethel’s manta sub, it was enmeshed in the cuttlefish sub’s arms and struggling to break free. Dev could see Ethel and the body of her cousin in its left eye socket cockpit. There was no sign of the kid. Presumably he had fled once the battle started. Ethel herself was preoccupied with manipulating the controls, which consisted of a waist-high column festooned with knobbly protrusions.

Under her ministrations the manta thrashed its wings and flexed its body, but the cuttlefish had it tightly clasped. No amount of writhing was going to detach those arms with their lining of finely serrated suckers.

And now another vessel was jockeying above the manta, looking for an opportunity. This sub had elements of turtle in its makeup, and elements of jellyfish. A thick keratin shell protected all of its body except for the underside, from which hung a curtain of transparent, coiling tendrils.

It was attempting to drape these tendrils onto the manta sub’s back. The manoeuvre was delicate and required precision. The turtle-jellyfish’s pilot was trying to keep the tendrils from accidentally making contact with the cuttlefish sub’s arms. Dev could only assume there were venom cysts embedded in those dangling gelatinous tubules.

Sure enough, when the turtle-jellyfish sub finally managed to touch the manta sub’s cartilaginous skin, the manta immediately arched and convulsed. It was clearly in terrific pain, and as Dev watched, its efforts to break free of the cuttlefish sub’s clutches grew feebler and more uncoordinated. Ethel wrenched and hammered urgently at the controls, but her vessel had become unresponsive.

The turtle-jellyfish sub was poised to attack again. The venom in its tendrils must be some kind of paralytic neurotoxin. Another dose would bring the manta sub to a complete standstill, possibly even kill it. Already the cuttlefish sub was exploiting its weakened state, probing the cornea of its left eye with its tentacles. They could undoubtedly pop the eye open and drag Ethel out, Dev thought. Once the manta sub was rendered entirely helpless, there’d be nothing to prevent it.

Dev made a beeline for the turtle-jellyfish sub. It had only one point of vulnerability that he could see. Its pilot sat suspended beneath its shell in a blister-like pod, just ahead of the tendrils.

Dev swam close enough to bring the pod within the range of the HVP. With the battle raging around him in a surge of bubbles and swirls of bioluminescence, he took aim.

Then it hit him – a clench in his gut, a wallop of pure agony. He doubled up, almost losing his grip on the pistol. It was like the worst stomach cramp imaginable, the kind you got with severe food poisoning or some awful gastric infection.

He glimpsed the turtle-jellyfish descending towards the manta again, that mat of dangling tendrils ready to stroke a bare patch of the other sub’s wing.

Even as his innards twisted inside him, seeming to tie themselves in knots, Dev raised the HVP. His host form might be rebelling, it might be doing its utmost to undermine him, but he would not let it get the better of him. Fuck the pain. Fuck it. Fuck it and fuck ISS and fuck exponential cellular breakdown and fuck absolutely
everything
.

He lined up the shot again, eyeing down the barrel of the HVP and centring the pilot blister in the fluorescent triangle formed by the front sight’s inverted V and the rear sight’s matching topless trapezoid.

The sabot round burst the blister, and also the head of the Tritonian inside.

The turtle-jellyfish sub drifted away, caught by some current, and Ethel’s manta sub was spared a second stinging.

Ethel was far from out of trouble, though. The cuttlefish sub’s tentacles were squeezing the cockpit eye, making its membranous cornea bulge alarmingly.

Stomach still cramping, Dev pawed his way down through the water to the two entangled subs.

Elsewhere, the worshippers of the Ice King appeared to have the upper hand. The seahorse had been torn free from the eel by a third sub, and now the two enemy subs had joined together and were ripping it asunder between them.

The anglerfish sub was reeling from the swordfish sub’s onslaught, blood billowing from a score of gashes in its body.

The second manta sub was faring somewhat better. It had abandoned the pufferfish sub and moved on to a sinuous, cylindrical craft gifted with a round mouth full of concentric rings of teeth. The manta was clobbering the parasitical, lamprey-like nightmare with its wings, pounding relentlessly so that the pilot of the other sub was unable to do anything except retreat.

Dev swam under Ethel’s manta sub and navigated through the thicket of the cuttlefish sub’s clinging arms. Buffeted by the forces of the contest between the two vessels and stricken by waves of pain from within, he nevertheless made it to the manta’s mouth.

He ducked into the opening and straightaway spied a sphincter set in the roof of the mouth, directly above him. It was tight shut, but would, if open, admit a person, or so he reckoned.

There was no other visible entry point. The filter plates were too narrow, and anyway would lead only to the manta’s oesophagus and stomach. He prodded the sphincter experimentally, and sure enough, at the touch of his fingers, it dilated, revealing a vertical shaft. He swam in, and the aperture sealed itself behind him.

A couple of metres up the shaft, he came to a three-way junction. Two narrow tunnels branched left and right – the access ducts to the eye socket cockpits – while a third headed along the manta’s dorsal line, towards the creature’s tail. He took the turn to the left cockpit.

As he clawed along the duct he tried not to think about the fact that he was inside the body of a living entity. The rigid, uneven walls around him were manta flesh. He was travelling through the meat of the beast via a passageway that had been burrowed out specially for that purpose. Claustrophobia and a vague repulsion warred within him, but they at least took his mind off the pain in his intestines.

He reached the cockpit just as the cornea succumbed to the pressure put on it by the tentacles. The membrane burst with a sickening rending sound, and within seconds the diamond-shaped pad on the end of one of the tentacles had slithered through the jagged tear and was probing for Ethel.

She scooped up her shock lance and gave the tentacle a jolt that deterred it, but not for long. It was back, groping for her, within moments. She pressed the lever on the shock lance again, but this time there was no flash, no bioelectric discharge. Either the weapon had run dry or it needed a while to build up its energies for the next shot.

Dev shouldered in beside her and fired the HVP at the tentacle. From point-blank range, the sabot round practically sheared the pad off. The tentacle withdrew smartly in a cloud of dark blood, the pad still clinging on by just a shred of gristle.

Ethel showed appreciation.

Dev said,
I’m sorry about your cousin
, with a nod at the corpse now curled foetally on the floor.

A shiver of blue crossed Ethel’s face, so dark it was almost indigo.
I’ll grieve when I have time to grieve. Come on! It’s not safe in this eye anymore.

She slid into the access duct, Dev close behind. They crossed over to the other, still intact cockpit, where there was a control column identical to that in the cockpit they had just vacated.

The cuttlefish sub hadn’t loosened its grip on the manta sub, but the injury to its tentacle had given it pause for thought. The pilots were trying to regain command of their vessel, frantically pressing the buds and pulling the stalks on their control columns in various permutations. The cuttlefish remained recalcitrant, unwilling to do as told. It had been hurt – the tip of a limb all but amputated – and its survival instincts were at odds with the wishes of its masters.

The control columns, Dev realised, were patched directly in the creatures’ nervous systems. The animals retained the lower orders of brain function, the ones that regulated breathing, heartbeat, digestion and so on. The pilots ran everything else.

The subs were, in effect, zombies, with their Tritonian crews providing purpose, motivation and guidance. Yet even mindless, obedient slaves balked when they were confronted with something which caused pain or presented a clear threat.

Ethel grabbed the largest stalks, a matching pair, and flipped them to and fro. The manta sub seesawed from side to side. Had Dev been standing rather than floating, he would have been tossed violently about. The same for Ethel. As it was, Dev felt the water within the cockpit churn around him while he remained more or less stationary. The wonders of hydrodynamics.

The manta sub tore itself away from the cuttlefish sub’s arms.

As the limbs flailed loose, Ethel threw the manta into reverse. The sub glided backwards with a few beats of its vast wings, before Ethel propelled it forwards again, at ramming speed.

The cuttlefish sub was still drawing its arms together, gathering itself, as the manta sub struck. The manta’s momentum and greater bulk sent the cephalopod spinning away.

The cuttlefish’s pilots barely had time to regroup and right their vessel before the manta struck again. The leading edge of one wing hammered it straight between the eyes.

Ethel didn’t stop. She kept butting, battering and bashing the cuttlefish sub remorselessly, giving no quarter, not letting up until the creature was pounded into submission.

Eventually the cuttlefish just hung in the water, its limbs splayed, showing no voluntary movement. There wasn’t any external damage that Dev could see, but some of its internal organs must surely have been ruptured. Nothing, least of all a pulpy-bodied invertebrate, could endure the kind of punishment the manta had been dishing out and remain unscathed.

In its eye socket cockpits, its pilots floated dazed and bewildered, only just conscious. Dev almost felt sorry for them. They could hardly have anticipated how brutal and ferocious Ethel’s retaliation would be. Though part-paralysed by the turtle-jellyfish sub’s sting, the manta sub was still formidable, and once it had shaken itself free, it had proved that the cuttlefish sub was no match for it – especially with a vengeful, unforgiving Ethel at the helm.

Ethel scooped up her shock lance.
I’m going out there to finish this
, she said.

You mean kill those two?

Tempting, but no. They are the ones who can halt the battle. They can call off their allies and lead them in a retreat. I will make them do so. They are bullies, and will quickly comply once I threaten them
.

Dev did not doubt that, but he wasn’t sure there was much of a battle left to end. From what he could see, Ethel’s side were in poor shape. The anglerfish had been sliced to ribbons by the swordfish. The seahorse sub was now in several pieces, gently dispersing.

Only the other manta sub remained intact, and it was beleaguered on all side by enemy vessels, harrying it. The manta fought back, giving as good as it got, swatting at any opponent who came within reach, but the constant siege was wearing it down. Either it or its pilots were tiring. Sooner or later it would reach the limits of its endurance and, exhausted, fall victim to its assailants.

Ethel inserted herself into the access duct, only to come reeling back a split second later. Blood erupted from her shoulder, mushrooming outward.

The Tritonian kid emerged from the duct, carrying a short knife fashioned from some animal’s tooth. Dev noticed ornate decorative patterns carved in the ivory, intricate scrimshaw. He took in this detail even as he moved to intercept the boy.

In the name of the Ice King!
the kid said, slashing at Dev with the knife.
Die, ungilled scum!

Dev seized his wrist and pivoted his hand back against itself. Instantly the knife slipped from his grasp. Dev batted the weapon behind him, out of reach, then wrenched the kid’s arm round and yanked it up behind his back until his fist was lodged between his shoulderblades.

He hated using this level of force against a minor, but the kid needed to be pacified. His fanaticism made him more dangerous than someone of his tender years would otherwise be, or indeed ought to be.

The kid kicked at Dev with his heels, trying to worm his way free. Dev increased the compliance hold by driving the kid’s hand even further up his back.

Then the kid did something unexpected. He performed a back-flip, paddling hard with his legs until he was above Dev, then behind him.

Dev kept his hold on the boy’s wrist, but now the kid was where the knife had fetched up. He seized it and stabbed at Dev, who had to relinquish his grasp on the boy in order to evade the knife thrust.