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?’
‘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 read-out 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.