Galactic North (17 page)

“Any other propaganda to share with me?”

“There are two hundred of these spheres. They inflate and deflate like bladders, maintaining C-A’s equilibrium. I’m not sure how the deflation happens, except that it’s something to do with changing the piezoelectric current in the tubes.”

“I still don’t see why Gilgamesh needs it.”

“Think. If you can get a sample of this to Ganymede, they might be able to find a way of attacking it. All you’d need would be a molecular agent capable of opening the gaps between the fullerene strands so that a molecule of water could squeeze through, or something that impedes the piezoelectric force.”

Absently Vargovic watched a squid-like predator nibble a chunk from the bag of a ventling. The squid’s blood ran thick with two forms of haemoglobin, one oxygen-bearing, one tuned for hydrogen sulphide. They used glycoproteins to keep their blood flowing and switched metabolisms as they swam from oxygen-dominated to sulphide-dominated water.

He snapped his attention back to Cholok. “I can’t believe I came all this way for . . . what? Carbon?” He shook his head, slotting the gesture into the primary narrative of their conversation. “How did you obtain this?”

“An accident, with a gilly.”

“Go on.”

“An explosion near one of the bubbles. I was the surgeon assigned to the gilly; had to remove a lot of hyperdiamond from him. It wasn’t difficult to save a few splinters.”

“Forward-thinking of you.”

“Hard part was persuading Gilgamesh to send you. Especially after Maunciple—”

“Don’t lose any sleep over him,” Vargovic said, consulting his coffee. “He was a fat bastard who couldn’t swim fast enough.”

The surgery took place the next day. Vargovic woke with his mouth furnace-dry.

He felt . . . odd. They had warned him of this. He had even interviewed subjects who had undergone similar procedures in Gilgamesh’s experimental labs. They told him he would feel fragile, as if his head was no longer adequately coupled to his body. The periodic flushes of cold around his neck only served to increase that feeling.

“You can speak,” Cholok said, looming over him in surgeon ’s whites. “But the cardiovascular modifications—and the amount of reworking we’ve done to your laryngeal area— will make your voice sound a little strange. Some of the gilled are really only comfortable talking to their own kind.”

He held a hand before his eyes, examining the translucent webbing that now spanned between his fingers. There was a dark patch in the pale tissue of his palm: Cholok’s embedded sample. The other hand held another.

“It worked, didn’t it?” His voice sounded squeaky. “I can breathe water.”

“And air,” Cholok said. “Though what you’ll now find is that really strenuous exercise only feels natural when you’re submerged.”

“Can I move?”

“Of course,” she said. “Try standing up. You’re stronger than you feel.”

He did as she suggested, using the moment to assess his surroundings. A neural monitor clamped his crown. He was naked, in a brightly lit revival room; one glass-walled side faced the exterior ocean. It was from here that Cholok had first contacted Gilgamesh.

“This place is secure, isn’t it?”

“Secure?” she said, as if the word itself was obscene. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“Then tell me about the Denizens.”

“What?”

“Demarchy codeword. Cryptanalysis intercepted it recently—supposedly something about an experiment in radical biomodification. I was reminded of it in the aquarium. ” Vargovic fingered the gills in his neck. “Something that would make this look like cosmetic surgery. We heard the Demarchy had tailored the sulphur-based metabolism of the ventlings for human use.”

She whistled. “That would be quite a trick.”

“Useful, though—especially if you wanted a workforce who could tolerate the anoxic environments around the vents, where the Demarchy happens to have certain mineralogical interests.”

“Maybe.” Cholok paused. “But the changes required would be beyond surgery. You’d have to script them in at the developmental level. And even then . . . I’m not sure that what you’d end up with would necessarily be human any more.” It was as if she shivered, though Vargovic was the one who felt cold, still standing naked beside the revival table. “All I can say is, if it happened, no one told me.”

“I thought I’d ask, that’s all.”

“Good.” She brandished a white medical scanner. “Now can I run a few more tests? We have to follow procedure.”

Cholok was right: quite apart from the fact that Vargovic ’s operation was completely real—and therefore susceptible to complications that had to be looked for and monitored—any deviation from normal practice was undesirable.

After the first hour or so, the real strangeness of his transformation hit home. He had been blithely unaffected by it until then, but when he saw himself in a full-body mirror, in the corner of Cholok’s revival room, he knew that there was no going back.

Not easily, anyway. The Gilgamesh surgeons had promised him they could undo the work—but he didn’t believe them. After all, the Demarchy was ahead of Ganymede in the biosciences, and even Cholok had told him reversals were tricky. He’d accepted the mission in any case: the pay tantalising; the prospect of the sulphur projects rather less so.

Cholok spent most of the day with him, only breaking off to talk to other clients or confer with her team. Breathing exercises occupied most of that time: prolonged periods spent underwater, nulling the brain’s drowning response. Unpleasant, but Vargovic had done worse things in training. They practised fully submerged swimming, using his lungs to regulate buoyancy, followed by instruction about keeping his gill-openings—what Cholok called his opercula— clean, which meant ensuring the health of the colonies of commensal bacteria that thrived in the openings and crawled over the fine secondary flaps of his lamellae. He’d read the brochure: what she’d done was to surgically sculpt his anatomy towards a state somewhere between human and air-breathing fish: incorporating biochemical lessons from lungfish and walking-catfish. Fish breathed water through their mouths and returned it to the sea via their gills, but it was the gills in Vargovic’s neck that served the function of a mouth. His true gills were below his thoracic cavity: crescent-shaped gashes below his ribs.

“Compared to your body size,” she said, “these gill-openings are never going to give you the respiratory ef ficiency you’d have if you went in for more dramatic changes—”

“Like a Denizen?”

“I told you, I don’t know anything about that.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He flattened the gill-flaps down, watching—only slightly nauseated—as they puckered with each exhalation. “Are we finished?”

“Just some final bloodwork,” she said, “to make sure everything’s still functioning properly. Then you can go and swim with the fishes.”

While she was busy at one of her consoles, surrounded by false-colour entoptics of his gullet—he asked her, “Do you have the weapon?”

Cholok nodded absently and opened a drawer, fishing out a hand-held medical laser. “Not much,” she said. “I disabled the yield-suppresser, but you’d have to aim it at someone’s eyes to do much damage.”

Vargovic hefted the laser, scrutinising the controls in its contoured haft. Then he grabbed Cholok’s head and twisted her around, dousing her face with the laser’s actinic-blue beam. There were two consecutive popping sounds as her eyeballs evaporated.

“What, like that?”

Conventional scalpels did the rest.

He rinsed off the blood, dressed and left the medical centre alone, travelling kilometres down-city, to where Cadmus-Asterius narrowed to a point. Even though there were many gillies moving freely through the city—they were volunteers, by and large, with full Demarchy rights— he did not linger in public for long. Within a few minutes he was safe inside a warren of collagen-walled service tunnels, frequented only by technicians, servitors or other gill-workers. The late Cholok had been right: breathing air was more difficult now. It felt too thin.

“Demarchy security advisory,” said a bleak machine voice emanating from the wall. “A murder has occurred in the medical sector. The suspect may be an armed gill-worker. Approach with extreme caution.”

They’d found Cholok. Risky, killing her. But Gilgamesh preferred to burn its bridges, removing the possibility of any sleeper turning traitor after they had fulfilled their usefulness. In the future, Vargovic mulled, they might be better using a toxin, rather than the immediate kill. He made a mental note to insert that in his report.

He entered the final tunnel, not far from the waterlock that was his destination. At the tunnel’s far end a technician sat on a crate, listening with a stethoscope to something going on behind an access panel. For a moment Vargovic considered passing the man, hoping he was engrossed in his work. He began to approach him, padding on bare webbed feet, which made less noise than the shoes he had just removed. Then the man nodded to himself, uncoupled from the listening post and slammed the hatch. Grabbing his crate, he stood and made eye contact with Vargovic.

“You’re not meant to be here,” he said. Then offered, almost plaintively, “Can I help you? You’ve just had surgery, haven’t you? I always recognise new ones like you: always a little red around the gills.”

Vargovic drew his collar higher, then relented because that made it harder to breathe. “Stay where you are,” he said. “Put down the crate and freeze.”

“Christ, that advisory—it was you, wasn’t it?” the man said.

Vargovic raised the laser. Blinded, the man blundered into the wall, dropping the crate. He made a pitiful moan. Vargovic crept closer, the man stumbling into the scalpel. Not the cleanest of killings, but that hardly mattered.

Vargovic was sure the Demarchy would shortly seal off access to the ocean—especially when his latest murder came to light. For now, however, the locks were accessible. He moved into the air-filled chamber, his lungs now aflame for water. High-pressure jets filled the room, and he quickly transitioned to water-breathing, feeling his thoughts clarify. The secondary door clammed open, revealing ocean. He was kilometres below the ice, and the water here was both chillingly cold and under crushing pressure—but it felt normal; pressure and cold registered only as abstract qualities of the environment. His blood was inoculated with glycoproteins now, molecules which would lower its freezing point below that of water.

The late Cholok had done well.

Vargovic was about to leave the city when a second gill-worker appeared in the doorway, returning to the city after completing a shift. He killed her efficiently, and she bequeathed him a thermally inwoven wetsuit, for working in the coldest parts of the ocean. The wetsuit had octopus ancestry, and when it slithered onto him it left apertures for his gill-openings. She had been wearing goggles that had infrared and sonar capability, and carried a hand-held tug. The thing resembled the still-beating heart of a vivisected animal, its translucent components nobbed with dark veins and ganglia. But it was easy to use: Vargovic set its pump to maximum thrust and powered away from the lower levels of C-A. Even in the relatively uncontaminated water of the Europan ocean, visibility was low; he would not have been able to see anything were the city not abundantly illuminated on all its levels. Even so, he could see no more than half a kilometre upwards; the higher parts of C-A were lost in golden haze and then deepening darkness. Although its symmetry was upset by protrusions and accretions, the city’s basic conic form was still evident, tapering at the narrowest point to an inlet mouth which ingested ocean. The cone was surrounded by a haze of flotation bubbles, black as caviar. He remembered the chips of hyperdiamond in his hands. If Cholok was right, Vargovic’s people might find a way to make it water-permeable; opening the fullerene weave sufficiently so that the spheres’ buoyant properties would be destroyed. The necessary agent could be introduced into the ocean by ice-penetrating missiles. Some time later—Vargovic was uninterested in the details— the Demarchy cities would begin to groan under their own weight. If the weapon worked sufficiently quickly, there might not even be time to act against it. The cities would fall from the ice, sinking down through the black kilometres of ocean below them.

He swam on.

Near C-A, the rocky interior of Europa climbed upwards to meet him. He had travelled three or four kilometres north, and was comparing the visible topography—lit by service lights installed by Demarchy gill-workers— with his own mental maps of the area. Eventually he found an outcropping of silicate rock. Beneath the overhang was a narrow ledge on which a dozen or so small boulders had fallen. One was redder than the others. Vargovic anchored himself to the ledge and hefted the red rock, the warmth of his fingertips activating its latent biocircuitry. A screen appeared in the rock, filling with Mishenka’s face.

“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?”