“I’m on time,” Vargovic said, his own voice sounding even less recognisable through the distorting medium of the water. “I presume you’re ready?”
“Problem,” Mishenka said. “Big fucking problem.”
“What?”
“Extraction site’s compromised.” Mishenka—or rather the simulation of Mishenka that was running in the rock— anticipated Vargovic’s next question: “A few hours ago the Demarchy sent a surface team out onto the ice, ostensibly to repair a transponder. But the spot they’re covering is right where we planned to pull you out.” He paused. “You did—uh—kill Cholok, didn’t you? I mean, you didn’t just grievously injure her?”
“You’re talking to a professional.”
The rock did a creditable impression of Mishenka looking pained. “Then the Demarchy got to her.”
Vargovic waved his hand in front of the rock. “I got what I came for, didn’t I?”
“You got something.”
“If it isn’t what Cholok said it was, then she’s accomplished nothing except get herself dead.”
“Even so . . .” Mishenka appeared to entertain a thought briefly, before discarding it. “Listen, we always had a back-up extraction point, Vargovic. You’d better get your ass there.” He grinned. “Hope you can swim faster than Maunciple. ”
It was thirty kilometres south.
He passed a few gill-workers on the way, but they ignored him and once he was more than five kilometres from C-A there was increasingly less evidence of human presence. There was a head-up display in the goggles. Vargovic experimented with the readout modes before calling up a map of the whole area. It showed his location, and also three dots following him from C-A.
He was being tailed by Demarchy security.
They were at least three kilometres behind him now, but they were perceptibly narrowing the distance. With a cold feeling gripping his gut, it occurred to Vargovic that there was no way he could make it to the extraction point before the Demarchy caught him.
Ahead, he noticed a thermal hot spot: heat bubbling up from the relatively shallow level of the rock floor. The security operatives were probably tracking him via the gillworker ’s appropriated equipment. But once he was near the vent he could ditch it: the water was warmer there; he wouldn’t need the suit, and the heat, light and associated turbulence would confuse any other tracking system. He could lie low behind a convenient rock, stalk them while they were preoccupied with the homing signal.
It struck Vargovic as a good plan. He covered the distance to the vent quickly, feeling the water grow warmer around him, noticing how the taste of it changed, turning brackish. The vent was a fiery red fountain surrounded by bacteria-crusted rocks and the colourless Europan equivalent of coral. Ventlings were everywhere, their pulpy bags shifting as the currents altered. The smallest were motile, ambling on their stilts like animated bagpipes, navigating around the triadic stumps of their dead relatives.
Vargovic ensconced himself in a cave, after placing the gill-worker’s equipment near another cave on the far side of the vent, hoping that the security operatives would look there first. While they did so, he would be able to kill at least one of them; maybe two. Once he had their weapons, taking care of the third would be a formality.
Something nudged him from behind.
What Vargovic saw when he turned around was something too repulsive even for a nightmare. It was so wrong that for a faltering moment he could not quite assimilate what he was looking at, as if the thing was a three-dimensional perception test; a shape that refused to stabilise in his head. The reason he could not hold it still was because part of him refused to believe that this thing had any connection with humanity. But the residual traces of human ancestry were too obvious to ignore.
Vargovic knew—beyond any reasonable doubt—that what he was seeing was a Denizen. Others loomed from the cave’s depths—five more of them, all roughly similar, all aglow with faint bioluminescence, all regarding him with darkly intelligent eyes. Vargovic had seen pictures of mermaids in books when he was a child; what he was looking at now were macabre corruptions of those innocent illustrations. These things were the same fusions of human and fish as in those pictures—but every detail had been twisted towards ugliness, and the true horror of it was that the fusion was total; it was not simply that a human torso had been grafted to a fish’s tail, but that the splice had been made—it was obvious—at the genetic level, so that in every aspect of the creature there was something simultaneously and grotesquely piscine. The faces were the worst, bisected by a lipless down-curved slit of a mouth, almost shark-like. There was no nose, not even a pair of nostrils; just an acreage of flat, sallow fish-flesh. The eyes were forward facing; all expression compacted into their dark depths.
The first creature had touched him with one of its arms, which terminated in an obscenely human hand. And then—to compound the horror—it spoke, its voice perfectly clear and calm despite the water.
“We’ve been expecting you, Vargovic.”
The others behind murmured, echoing the sentiment.
“What?”
“So glad you were able to complete your mission.”
Vargovic began to get a grip, shakily. He reached up and dislodged the Denizen’s hand from his shoulder. “You aren’t why I’m here,” he said, forcing authority into his voice, drawing on every last drop of Gilgamesh training to suppress his nerves. “I wanted to know about you . . . that was all—”
“No,” the lead Denizen said, opening its mouth to expose an alarming array of teeth. “You misunderstand. Coming here was always your mission. You have brought us something we want very much. That was always your purpose.”
“Brought you something?” His mind was reeling now.
“Concealed within you.” The Denizen nodded: a human gesture that only served to magnify the horror of what it was. “The means by which we will strike at the Demarchy; the means by which we will take the ocean.”
He thought of the chips in his hands. “I think I understand, ” he said slowly. “It was always intended for you, is that what you mean?”
“Always.”
Then he’d been lied to by his superiors—or they had at least drastically simplified the matter. He filled in the gaps himself, making the necessary mental leaps: evidently Gilgamesh was already in contact with the Denizens—bizarre as it seemed—and the chips of hyperdiamond were meant for the Denizens, not his own people. Presumably— although he couldn’t begin to guess at how this might be possible—the Denizens had the means to examine the shards and fabricate the agent that would unravel the hyperdiamond weave. They’d be acting for Gilgamesh, saving it the bother of actually dirtying its hands in the attack. He could see why this might appeal to Control. But if that was the case . . . why had Gilgamesh ever faked ignorance about the Denizens? It made no sense. But on the other hand, he could not concoct a better theory to replace it.
“I have what you want,” he said, after due consideration. “Cholok said removing it would be simple.”
“Cholok can always be relied upon,” the Denizen said.
“You knew—know—her, then?”
“She made us what we are today.”
“You hate her, then?”
“No; we love her.” The Denizen flashed its shark-like smile again, and it seemed to Vargovic that as its emotional state changed, so did the coloration of its bioluminescence. It was scarlet now, no longer the blue-green hue it had displayed upon its first appearance. “She took the abomination that we were and made us something better. We were in pain, once. Always in pain. But Cholok took it away, made us strong. For that they punished her, and then us.”
“If you hate the Demarchy,” Vargovic said, “why have you waited until now before attacking it?”
“Because we can’t leave this place,” one of the other Denizens said, the tone of its voice betraying femininity. “The Demarchy hated what Cholok had done to us. She brought our humanity to the fore, made it impo
ssible for them to treat us as animals. We thought they would kill us, rather than risk our existence becoming known to the rest of Circum-Jove. Instead, they banished us here.”
“They thought we might come in handy,” said another of the lurking creatures.
Just then, another Denizen entered the cave, having swum in from the sea.
“Demarchy agents have followed him,” it said, its coloration blood red, tinged with orange, pulsing lividly. “They’ll be here in a minute.”
“You’ll have to protect me,” Vargovic said.
“Of course,” the lead Denizen said. “You’re our saviour.”
Vargovic nodded vigorously, no longer convinced that he could handle the three operatives on his own. Ever since he had arrived in the cave he had felt his energy dwindling, as if he was succumbing to slow poisoning. A thought tugged at the back of his mind, and for a moment he almost paid attention to it; almost considered seriously the possibility that he was being poisoned. But what was going on beyond the cave was too distracting. He watched the three Demarchy agents approach, pulled forward by the tugs they held in front of them. Each agent carried a slender harpoon gun, tipped with a vicious barb.
They didn’t stand a chance.
The Denizens moved too quickly, lancing out from the shadows, cutting through the water. The creatures moved faster than the Demarchy agents, even though they only had their own muscles and anatomy to propel them. But it was more than enough. They had no weapons, either—not even harpoons. But sharpened rocks more than sufficed— that and their teeth.
Vargovic was impressed by their teeth.
Afterwards, the Denizens returned to the cave to join their cousins. They moved more sluggishly now, as if the fury of the fight had drained them. For a few moments they were silent, their bioluminescence curiously subdued.
Slowly, though, Vargovic watched their colour return.
“It was better that they not kill you,” the leader said.
“Damn right,” Vargovic said. “They wouldn’t just have killed me, you know.” He opened his fists, exposing his palms. “They’d have made sure you never got this.”
The Denizens—all of them—looked momentarily towards his open hands, as if there ought to have been something there.
“I’m not sure you understand,” the leader said, eventually.
“Understand what?”
“The nature of your mission.”
Fighting his fatigue—it was a black slick lapping at his consciousness—Vargovic said, “I understand perfectly well. I have the samples of hyperdiamond, in my hands—”
“That isn’t what we want.”
He didn’t like this, not at all. It was the way the Denizens were slowly creeping closer to him, sidling around him to obstruct his exit from the cave.
“What then?”
“You asked why we haven’t attacked them before,” the leader said, with frightening charm. “The answer’s simple: we can’t leave the vent.”
“You can’t?”
“Our haemoglobin. It’s not like yours.” Again that awful shark-like smile—and now he was well aware of what those teeth could do, given the right circumstances. “It was tailored to allow us to work here.”
“Copied from the ventlings?”
“Adapted, yes. Later it became the means of imprisoning us. The DNA in our bone marrow was manipulated to limit the production of normal haemoglobin; a simple matter of suppressing a few beta-globin genes while retaining the variants that code for ventling haemoglobin. Hydrogen sulphide is poisonous to you, Vargovic. You probably already feel weak. But we can’t survive without it. Oxygen kills us.”
“You leave the vent . . .”
“We die, within a few hours. There’s more. The water’s hot here, so hot that we don’t need the glycoproteins. We have the genetic instructions to synthezise them, but they’ve also been turned off. But without the glycoproteins we can’t swim into colder water. Our blood freezes.”
Now he was surrounded by them; looming aquatic devils, flushed a florid shade of crimson. And they were coming closer.
“But what do you expect me to do about it?”
“You don’t have to do anything, Vargovic.” The leader opened its chasmic jaw wide, as if tasting the water. It was a miracle an organ like that was capable of speech in the first place . . .
“I don’t?”
“No.” And with that the leader reached out and seized him, while at the same time he was pinned from behind by another of the creatures. “It was Cholok’s doing,” the leader continued. “Her final gift to us. Maunciple was her first attempt at getting it to us—but Maunciple never made it.”
“He was too fat.”
“All the defectors failed—they just didn’t have the stamina to make it this far from the city. That was why Cholok recruited you—an outsider.”
“Cholok recruited me?”
“She knew you’d kill her—you have, of course—but that didn’t stop her. Her life mattered less than what she was about to give us. It was Cholok who tipped off the Demarchy about your primary extraction site, forcing you to come to us.”
He struggled, but it was pointless. All he could manage was a feeble, “I don’t understand—”
“No,” the Denizen said. “Perhaps we never expected you to. If you had understood, you might have been less than willing to follow Cholok’s plan.”
“Cholok was never working for us?”
“Once, maybe. But her last clients were us.”
“And now?”
“We take your blood, Vargovic.” Their grip on him tightened. He used his last draining reserves of strength to try to work loose, but it was futile.
“My blood?”
“Cholok put something in it. A retrovirus—a very hardy one, capable of surviving in your body. It reactivates the genes that were suppressed by the Demarchy. Suddenly, we’ll be able to make oxygen-carrying haemoglobin. Our blood will fill up with glycoproteins. It’s no great trick: all the cellular machinery for making those molecules is already present; it just needs to be unshackled.”
“Then you need . . . what? A sample of my blood?”
“No,” the Denizen said, with genuine regret. “Rather more than a sample, I’m afraid. Rather a lot more.”
And then—with magisterial slowness—the creature bit into his arm, and as his blood spilled out, the Denizen drank. For a moment the others waited—but then they too came forward, and bit, and joined in the feeding frenzy.
All around Vargovic, the water was turning red.
WEATHER
We were at one-quarter of the speed of light, outbound from Shiva-Parvati with a hold full of refugees, when the Cockatrice caught up with us. She commenced her engagement at a distance of one light-second, seeking to disable us with long-range weapons before effecting a boarding operation. Captain Van Ness did his best to protect the Petronel, but we were a lightly armoured ship and Van Ness did not wish to endanger his passengers by provoking a damaging retaliation from the pirates. As coldly calculated as it might appear, Van Ness knew that it would be better for the sleepers to be taken by another ship than suffer a purposeless death in interstellar space.
As shipmaster, it was my duty to give Captain Van Ness the widest choice of options. When it became clear that the Cockatrice was on our tail, following us out from Shiva-Parvati, I recommended that we discard fifty thousand tonnes of nonessential hull material, in order to increase the rate of acceleration available from our Conjoiner drives. When the Cockatrice ramped up her own engines to compensate, I identified a further twenty thousand tonnes of material we could discard until the next orbitfall, even though the loss of the armour would marginally increase the radiation dosage we would experience during the flight. We gained a little, but the pirates still had power in reserve: they’d stripped back their ship to little more than a husk, and they didn’t have the mass handicap of our sleepers. Since we could not afford to lose any more hull material, I advised Van Ness to e
ject two of our three heavy shuttles, each of which massed six thousand tonnes when fully fuelled. That bought us yet more time, but to my dismay the pirates still found a way to squeeze a little more out of their engines.
Whoever they had as shipmaster, I thought, they were good at their work.
So I went to the engines themselves, to see if I could better my nameless opponent. I crawled out along the pressurised access tunnel that pierced the starboard spar, out to the coupling point where the foreign technology of the starboard Conjoiner drive was mated to the structural fabric of the Petronel. There I opened the hatch that gave access to the controls of the drive itself: six stiff dials, fashioned in blue metal, arranged in hexagon formation, each of which was tied to some fundamental aspect of the engine’s function. The dials were set into quadrant-shaped recesses, all now glowing a calm blue-green.
I noted the existing settings, then made near-microscopic alterations to three of the six dials, fighting to keep my hands steady as I applied the necessary effort to budge them. Even as I made the first alteration, I felt the engine respond: a shiver of power as some arcane process occurred deep inside it, accompanied by a shift in my own weight as the thrust increased by five or six per cent. The blue-green hue was now tinted with orange.
The Petronel surged faster, still maintaining her former heading. It was only possible to make adjustments to the starboard engine, since the port engine had no external controls. That didn’t matter, because the Conjoiners had arranged the two engines to work in perfect synchronisation, despite them being a kilometre apart. No one had ever succeeded in detecting the signals that passed between two matched C-drives, let alone in understanding the messages those signals carried. But everyone who worked with them knew what would happen if, by accident or design, the engines were allowed to get more than sixteen hundred metres apart.