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 gill-worker’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 impossible 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.