World of Water by James Lovegrove Page A

much of a coincidence to disregard, especially when she was defending him to other members of her race as though he and she weren’t strangers.
    The question of why the Tritonian couple happened to be here, hundreds of kilometres south of Tangaroa, in the exact same spot at the exact same moment as Dev, was something he would have to address later. For now, he was simply glad that the female was interceding on his behalf, making the case for him being allowed to live.
    It looked as though she was winning the argument, too. The Tritonians in the cuttlefish sub were exhibiting less hostility, more consent. The lights on their faces suggested that they considered themselves satisfied with the havoc they had wrought on the Egersund and its crew. One more human death, one fewer – what did they care?
    If sighing had been possible underwater, Dev would have breathed a sigh of relief.
    Three things happened next, in quick succession.
    First, the Egersund seemed to have had enough. It had taken on too much water. It could no longer stay upright. It gave in.
    The whaler slowly capsized, with a roar of tortured metal and roiling water. It was like watching a mountainside collapsing, a steady, unremitting black avalanche. The sea erupted into a nightmare of turbulence as the ship’s quarter-million tonnage bore down into it, and down, and further down.
    Dev felt himself being pushed bodily backwards by the wake of the ship’s collapse. Both the cuttlefish sub and the manta sub were shaken about, too.
    The second thing that happened was that hands seized Dev under the armpits and he was hauled away from the capsizing Egersund and the Tritonian submarines. He glimpsed diving gear – wetsuits, full-foot swim fins, compact oxygenated-crystal rebreathers – and could only assume he had been grabbed by Marines from the Admiral Winterbrook . The divers had turbine-driven jetpacks on their backs and were forging through the water at close to twenty knots.
    The third thing was a subaquatic explosion, a fireball blossoming somewhere by the Tritonian vessels, a sphere of brilliance encased in a glassy shell of bubbles. The detonation was sharp-sounding, a brief noise-spike amid the ongoing cacophony of the Egersund ’s demise.
    The afterimage of the explosion lingered in Dev’s retinas like a gibbous moon as the Marines spirited him further and further away from the scene of chaos. They were travelling so fast that he found it hard to breathe. All he could do was keep his head tucked in, open his mouth as wide as it would go, and suck in as much as he could of the water surging past.
    He hoped he could last. He hoped he wouldn’t black out. He hoped the Marines would slow down before he did lose consciousness and couldn’t force water through his gills anymore. He hoped he wasn’t going to become the first amphibious human being ever to drown.

 
    17
     
     
    B Y THE TIME Dev was safely aboard the Admiral Winterbrook , the excitement was over.
    The Egersund was gone, plummeting through thousands of fathoms into the icy gulfs of Triton’s ocean, dragging the redback carcass with it. An oil slick, a smattering of flotsam and a patch of troubled sea were all that was left to show for it.
    The manta sub and the cuttlefish sub were gone too. Gunnery Sergeant Jiang had deployed three torpedoes against the Tritonian vessels. After the first of them detonated, the submarines had dived; the next two torpedoes had been fired more to deter a return visit than in hopes of scoring a hit.
    Dev’s subaquatic saviours were Private Reyes and Private Cully, the team’s diving experts. Their brief had been to drag him clear of the danger zone, then rendezvous with the catamaran once Jiang had determined that the Tritonians had skedaddled. The fact that they had almost killed him during the rescue was not something Dev would hold against them. Alive was alive, however you got there.
    Sigursdottir tore into him, demanding to know what he’d thought he