World of Water (39 page)

“Ice King. Ten o’clock.”

The God Beneath the Sea, not content with sinking the
Admiral Winterbrook
, was coming back for the humans who’d been aboard the boat. It must have thought itself very clever to have shaken these tasty morsels loose.

“Francis!” Sigursdottir shouted. “You’re right in its path. Swim, woman. Swim!”

The Ice King was just below the surface, cutting against the angle of the waves. Francis had drifted some twenty metres from the rest of the group. There was no doubt the gargantuan crab had her in its sights. She was the nearest to it, and although she started swimming with all her might, the Ice King was easily going to outstrip her.

“Come on!” Blunt urged. “Francis, move your stupid fat butt! The bastard’s gaining on you!”

Francis cast a glance backwards. The leading edge of turbulence that marked the Ice King’s progress was approaching fast, faster than she could possibly go herself.

She halted.

“Francis! No!” Blunt cried.

Treading water, Francis reached down with one arm to detach something fastened to her belt.

“No, you fucking bitch! Don’t you dare!”

But Francis ignored Blunt’s pleading. She produced a Ninety-Nine Point Nine, a grenade that sent out a wave that disrupted the quantic interaction inside atoms, collapsing electron shells against their nuclei. The name derived from the fact that well over 99.9% of an atom was empty space, and this was the factor by which the grenade shrank everything within a programmable distance of its epicentre.

Quickly she thumbed the radius dial on the Ninety-Nine Point Nine, then grasped the detonation lever and thumbed out the safety pin.

Blunt howled words, becoming incomprehensible in her horror and despair.

Francis nodded to her, as if to say everything was okay, this was just what she had to do. She seemed aware that she was making a futile gesture, that she wasn’t going to
kill
the Ice King by any means. She was going to make it pay for her, though. It wouldn’t get her for free.

Then a vast pincer shot up from the water, clamping round her waist. Francis screamed shrilly as she became wedged between two of the serrations and the pincer applied bone-cracking, gut-bursting pressure.

She let go of the detonation lever, and a split second later there was a loud rending noise, not unlike a burp, as a three-metre-diameter sphere of matter condensed instantaneously down to the size of a poppy seed.

Encompassed within that sphere was all of Private First Class Francis and a sizeable chunk of the Ice King’s pincer.

The Ice King emitted a sound that Dev would quite happily have gone to his grave without ever hearing again, a cross between a screech and an earth tremor. It thrashed its injured pincer around, spraying gobs of grey-blue blood in all directions. The Ninety-Nine Point Nine had gouged out a perfect, clean-edged cavity in the claw. The wound was far from life-threatening – the equivalent of a person losing a pea-sized section of the ball of their thumb – but it clearly hurt.

“Yeah, motherfucker!” Blunt crowed, weeping. “Take that, bitch! That’s what you get! And there’ll be more of the same if you come for me.”

“Let’s go, Marines,” said Sigursdottir. “Francis has bought us some breathing space. Don’t waste it. Make it count.”

And they swam, into the teeth of the storm, powering through the waves that endlessly, endlessly tried to beat them back.

Even as they inched closer to Mazu, Dev kept looking over his shoulder. The Ice King had sunk out of sight. He hoped it had slouched off somewhere to tend to its wound, but he doubted it. The bastard thing wasn’t going to give up that easily. He knew from experience just how remorseless and tenacious it could be.

It reappeared – or rather, the tsunami that heralded its presence did.

The Ice King was coming for them yet again.

There was no point yelling a warning, urging everyone to swim harder. It would have been redundant. They were already going as fast as they could.

The tsunami curled, crested, swelled. Reyes and Cully, with Jiang between them, were lagging at the rear of the group. They would be first when the Ice King caught up – first to be pincer-grabbed and eaten.

But then they rose from the water. It was as though they were being lifted, all three of them, and were suddenly surfing rather than swimming.

Dev beheld this weird sight, asking himself if it was some tidal miracle, some bizarre trick of the waves or currents that was buoying the three Marines up and along.

Blunt was scooped up by the phenomenon next, then Handler and Fakhouri.

Finally it came for Dev, Milgrom and Sigursdottir.

All at once the nine of them, Marines and ISS employees alike, were skating along the surface faster than they could possibly have swum.

And Dev was grinning. Grinning like an idiot.

Because underneath them was something solid, a black, rubbery, undulating mass, and it was Ethel’s manta sub, and it was ferrying them on its back, keeping them ahead of the Ice King, whisking them like a magic carpet towards Mazu.

58

T
HE MANTA SUB
swerved to a halt beside Mazu’s western marina, where every berth stood empty after the mass exodus.

The humans on the manta’s back scrambled off onto the pontoons.

There wasn’t time to pause or retrench. The Ice King was still coming. With Sigursdottir leading the way and Reyes and Cully stretchering Jiang by the arms and legs, the group ran for cover.

The manta sub dived, seeking cover too.

The fleeing humans reached the gateway that linked the marina with the rest of the township, just as the Ice King hit the outer edge of the marina.

Literally hit, barrelling straight into the pontoons, which bucked and buckled under the impact.

Fakhouri lost her footing and stumbled, but Dev grabbed her, and everyone kept on running. They ran across a footbridge that leapt up and down under them like something in a funhouse at a fair. They ran round the perimeter walkway of a residential dome, then across another footbridge to a dome housing the power-distributing substation for the tidal barrages.

Sigursdottir waved them to a halt, and they hunkered down, sheltering in the lee of the substation dome.

“Milgrom, surveillance. The rest of you, take a breather, but get ready to run again if Milgrom says run.”

Milgrom sent up her hoverdrone over the marina. Its stabilisers worked hard but still it careened and yawed crazily in the high winds.

Reyes and Cully, panting hardest of anyone, gladly set down the still unconscious Jiang.

“We owe your Tritonian lady friend,” Sigursdottir said to Dev.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Not bad for a sea monkey, eh?”

Milgrom didn’t so much as twitch.

“And Francis,” said Blunt. “Owe her too. She died delaying the Ice King. Only wish she could have taken that fucking great cunt of a thing with her.”

“She set the Ninety-Nine to maximum radius,” said Fakhouri, “and it was like a paper cut to that monster.”

“Maybe a couple more Ninety-Nines, well placed...?” Reyes suggested optimistically.

Sigursdottir shook her head. “Nothing we’ve got on us is going to do anything but piss the Ice King off even more than it’s already pissed off. When the Sunbakers get here, that’s another story. Milgrom, what’s the creature’s status?”

“Hear those noises?” said Milgrom.

Above the wail of the syzygy storm came the sound of crashing and crunching – manmade structures being violently dismantled.

“That’s the marina getting the urban renewal treatment. The Ice King’s having a field day turning pontoons into kindling.”

“It won’t stop either,” said Handler. “Not until Mazu has gone the way of Dakuwaqa and Opochtli.”

“Actually, you may be wrong there,” said Milgrom. “It’s just started backing off, seems like.”

Now only the storm was audible – the wind keening, the sea roaring.

“Yeah, it’s withdrawing. Starting to do that circling thing again.”

“Prolonging the agony,” said Cully. “It knows we’re here. It’s toying with us.”

“It realises we’re trapped,” Reyes chimed in. “It can take all day if it wants. I’ve seen a killer whale do this with a sperm whale calf it’s already wounded. The orca just trails the calf, occasionally going in for a bite or just to thump it with its nose. Enjoying the victim’s helplessness.”

“Or,” said Dev, “if there’s a Plusser inside the Ice King, like I think there is, he’s calculating the best way to get to us.”

“What if he – it – whichever – loses interest?” Sigursdottir said.

“I don’t think there’s much danger of that, judging by past performance. If only there was.”

“No, this isn’t wishful thinking on my part. I’m concerned. The Ice King could maybe decide there aren’t enough of us to make hunting us worthwhile anymore. Why trash a whole township, go to all that trouble, just for nine humans? We’re not even a snack. There’s richer, easier pickings elsewhere.”

“I don’t see how that’s a bad thing,” said Handler. “We get to live.”

“Yes, but another township, fully populated, suffers,” said Sigursdottir. “Also, we’ll have lost track of the Ice King. Right now, we know where it is because it knows where we are. If it trundles off, it could go anywhere.”

“I get what you’re driving at,” said Dev. “I don’t like it, but I get it. For better or worse, we have the Ice King where just we want it.”

“This is where the
Astounding
is heading for. This is our last reported position, and without the
Admiral Winterbrook
’s comms array we’d have no way of getting a message through to say that the target has moved on, if it does. Commplants are useless until the storm blows over.”

“And there’s not a boat to be had anywhere,” said Milgrom, “so we can’t follow the Ice King to keep track of it.”

“Ethel could in her sub,” Dev said, “but we’d still have the same communications issues.”

“What it boils down to,” said Sigursdottir, with grim resignation, “is our mission parameters have just changed, yet again. We’re no longer monitoring the Ice King. Our job now is to keep it here, by any means necessary, until the
Astounding
arrives.”

“Fuck me,” said Reyes.

“Not while there are dogs on the street,” said Cully, which raised a bleak laugh and a smile or two.

“How long do we have to do that for?” said Blunt. “Not fuck Reyes, obviously. Keep the Ice King here.”

“It’s four and a bit hours until the earliest likely rendezvous with the
Astounding
,” said Sigursdottir.

“Four hours, twenty-one minutes, to be specific,” said Fakhouri.

“During which time we try to make the Ice King not forget about us but also try not to get ourselves killed?” said Cully. “That’s kind of a tall order.”

“Did you join the Marines for fun, Private Cully,” said Sigursdottir, “or did you join the Marines because you wanted challenges in your life?”

“Challenges, sir. To become all that I can be, sir.”

“Good answer. So here’s our new objective, people. For the next four hours, twenty minutes at least, we’re going to be playing hit-and-run with Crabcakes out there, until such time as Captain Maddox turns up and cooks it with a Sunbaker. We bug it and annoy it, and do all we can not to get massacred in the process. Got that?”

A round of
aye-aye
s and
roger that
s from the Marines.

“Awesome. Harmer, Handler, you’re welcome to sit this one out. This is military business.”

“Not a fucking chance,” said Dev. “But you, Handler, should maybe find somewhere to hole up.”

“Given the extent of my combat experience, that might be wise,” Handler said. “I can watch over Gunnery Sergeant Jiang until she recovers.”

“Appreciated,” said Sigursdottir.

Dev opened his mouth to suggest that she oughtn’t to trust Handler with Jiang.

“Something to add, Harmer?”

“Just that...”

No. Handler would never be that stupid, that foolish. If something bad happened to Jiang while she was in his care, who would be the most obvious suspect? Him. Handler knew that Dev was waiting for him to incriminate himself further somehow. His continued wellbeing hinged on Jiang’s continued wellbeing.

“Nothing, lieutenant.”

“Good. So let’s check weapons, count ammo, work out a strategy...”

As the Marines got in a huddle and conferred, Dev pulled up the countdown timer on his commplant once again. He hadn’t halted it even after deciding that the deterioration of his host form was a fraud. It read:

26:33:47

He reset it for the new deadline.

04:20:00

Until the
Astounding
was due.

That was the minimum length of time he and the Marines had to engage with the Ice King and keep it occupied in order to allow Maddox to come and deliver the coup de grâce. What was once an indicator of Dev’s theoretical allotted lifespan was now the Ice King’s.

And, he hoped, no one else’s.