World of Water by James Lovegrove Read Free Book Online Page B

overlooking Polis Plus territory. I am not here to chill. I am here to do a job.
    Everyone needs to let off steam every now and then.
    You’re not a Marine, are you?
    Come on. I’ve never met a serving military person who didn’t like to go crazy and let their hair down once in a while. In fact, you Marines are famous for it. I remember this one time, during the war, I was out with some of the guys from my regiment during a week’s R and R, and we came across a bunch of Marines who were shit-faced drunk and setting fire to –
    Terrific anecdote. I’d love to hear more of it sometime.
    You don’t mean that.
    No, I don’t.
    It really is pretty amusing. You see, we were on Kepler 62F, or was it Kepler 22B? One of the Keplers, at any rate. Desert planet. And it had these burrowing meerkat-type creatures, real pest, got everywhere, loved to chew on cables and crap under your cot. And the Marines... Sigursdottir? You still there?
     
    The call had been disconnected. Sigursdottir had hung up. Dev was projecting his thoughts out into a void.
    Shame. The story about Marines dousing the meerkat creatures’ fluffy tails in ethanol and setting them alight seldom failed to raise a smile. Especially the part where several of the terrified, flaming mammals – someone had dubbed them ‘nearkats’ – scurried into the mess habitat and it caught on fire and burned to the ground. The Marines ended up facing a disciplinary tribunal and receiving a non-judicial punishment of a forty-eight-hour forced march during which their only food rations were strips of roast nearkat meat.
    The point he had been trying to make by regaling Sigursdottir with the story was to show that Marines did know how to have fun. But maybe Sigursdottir wasn’t that sort of Marine. Or that sort of person.
    Dev suspected, though, that deep down, underneath that stern exterior, she was.
    He turned his attention back to the map screen, where the red dot that was the Reckless Abandon continued to nudge its way southward. The sea around it was rendered as a patchwork of concentric blobs in various deepening shades of blue, signifying seabed depth. The Admiral Winterbrook showed up as a faint secondary dot overlapping the Reckless Abandon ’s.
    All at once a fresh red dot appeared.
    Then another.
    Dev was gripped by alarm. Other vessels? Popping up out of nowhere?
    The explanation was only a little less disturbing.
    Blood was dripping from his nose onto the map screen.
    He pinched his nostrils shut and went down to the galley for a cloth to staunch the bleeding. Back on the flybridge, he wiped the screen clean with another cloth and waited for the flow of blood to taper off. Eventually it did, but not before the first cloth was almost fully saturated.
    So this was how it was going to be, was it? As the host form continued to break down, he could expect more nosebleeds? Perhaps, to add to the merriment, he would start bleeding from other orifices as well. There was something to look forward to.
    Jetboat and catamaran sped along side by side for another hour, and as Beta Ophiuchi rose further, the air grew humid. Dev’s skin began to prickle in the heat. Or was that another manifestation of his deterioration?
    He realised he was going to have to be unusually careful on this mission. Not only was he pushed for time, he would not be functioning at peak capacity, and his physical efficiency would inexorably decrease. His body was crumbling under him like an unstable cliff edge. It might give way at any moment.
    What he would have to bear in mind, above all else, was the need to data ’port out of the host form before it disintegrated completely. If he failed to get out in time, if his consciousness was still inside this body when its brain turned to mush, that would be that. Game over.
    The matrix rig and uplink were back at the ISS outpost at Tangaroa. Whatever else happened, he had to give himself sufficient leeway to return there before his condition got too bad. He