The Mudpie

Rimi B. Chatterjee

From the air, the Mudpie looked like an ordinary mangrove forest. You’d never guess it was the grave of one of the foremost cities of the modern era. Carlton Caron looked at the aerial photographs on the wall display in the Vijaya Base briefing room. The Mudpie sloped upwards to the north, a relic of how the monster tsunami of 2023 had scooped up the city’s giant corpse and danced a furious death-stomp all over Singapore Island. Carlton had been in first year at Naval School when it happened. It had felt like a bad omen for the days to come.

In the eighteen years since then, Nature had built a memorial to Old Singapore, made of mangroves and sea turtles and dolphins and fish and birds. Reef sharks, thought to be extinct in this part of the world, had returned, and it was thought there were saltwater crocodiles too, though no sightings had been confirmed.

The main reason for the growth of this popup natural paradise was the Glitch. The Glitch was a killer. It had claimed five lives in the months following the death of Old Singapore: two divers, one pilot and two fishermen who’d been part of the doomed rescue mission. There was nothing to rescue anyway: the Wave, generated by the sudden collapse of the undersea thorium mines around Rangsang Island, had towered above Singapore’s highest skyscrapers before falling on Marina Bay at a third of the speed of sound. In a matter of hours, a once-flourishing nation had turned into a an alien hellscape, buried in eternal night.

The refugees had been mainly coastal fisherfolk and marginal farmers. They were all sent on to Climate Town, the UN-mandated green refugee camp in the neighbouring nation of Melayu. That’s where all the surplus people got thrown away. It was a major sore point with the corporations that, having been thrown away, the people of Climate Town had refused to turn to drugs and prostitution and had instead built a township under the guidance of climate scientists that was, even now, an example to the world. Which is why Ramdhun Corporation spent a considerable portion of its image budget on slandering Climate Town. Because if losers don’t get punished, why would anyone be motivated to win?

In the days and weeks after the disaster, the neighbouring countries had mobilised for search and rescue. The rescue mission had quickly discovered a strange obstacle. In addition to the sudden sinkholes, mudslides and giant bubbles of escaping gas from the buried city, communications around the Mudpie were being interrupted by snatches of music or TV dialogue, map photos came out covered in faint overlays from children’s cartoon shows, motors caught fire, pumps failed, navigation threw up impossible readings, airplanes veered off course or lost power. It was as if the Glitch was some kind of ghostly static from a city in another dimension, even though nothing could possibly be alive down there, and GPR scans showed no activity in the few airpockets that still fought the crushing weight of the overlay.

With the mystery unsolved, and with international bourses in freefall, the ‘rescue’ mission had been abandoned pretty quickly, airplane routes had been redirected to avoid the Mudpie, and everyone had turned their back on the place. Except for Nature. Now, in 2041, it was a dense unchartable jungle where electronic equipment quickly betrayed you while the leeches and mosquitoes got to work. Like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the Mudpie was now a toxic eden, a space for the refugees of the Anthropocene to regroup and lick their wounds.

That was the problem. Humans, just bare naked primates without technology, were rumoured to be using the Mudpie as a refuge. Several luxury yachts in the Malacca Straits had reported night-time pilfering, and Ramdhun, owner-rulers of the floating city of New Singapore, had identified the Mudpie as the probable base of the miscreants. Now orders had been handed down to the Indian Navy’s training facility at Vijaya Base: set up a perimeter of shallow mines round the Mudpie. No one in, no one out. Carlton stared straight ahead, just one of the many attentive faces watching as the CO, Lt Gen. Karan ‘Hammerhead’ Singh, analysed the aerial scans.

‘The Glitch is unpredictable and deadly, which is why we are using low-tech semimanual two-man subs for this job. Doublecheck all critical operations and keep radio chatter to a minimum.’ The laser pointer flew southwards and settled on an area of dark blue, just south of the Mudpie. ‘This is the Rangsang Hole,’ said Hammerhead, ‘formed by the Collapse of 2023. It is 298 metres deep at its lowest point. The base of the Hole is covered by large rock fragments from the roof of the cavern, mixed in with metal scrap from the machines and scaffolding that were in the thorium mines. There may also be spots of residual radiation from the mines.’

The pointer moved to the narrow shelf that bordered the southern margin of the Mudpie. ‘These are the remains of Karimunbesar Island which was also destroyed by the Wave. It is the only space available to deploy the mines to the south of the Old Marina. Use extreme caution while setting up this part of the perimeter.’

Carlton stole a sidelong glance at Parzan Merchant, his best friend and closest comrade. Parzan’s eyes were focused straight ahead: he wasn’t about to give Hammerhead a reason to pick on him, which he did constantly. Hammerhead relied on their skills and competence, but he also regarded ‘Zany’ and ‘Cancan’ as a pair of bloody nuisances, since they refused to turn off their brains.

Parzan had met Carlton in final year at navy school, where they had quickly allied against the bullying they faced from their more mainstream peers. Carlton, who had been trained by his three feisty sisters, was much better at handling the bullies than Parzan, who had been primed to be bully-bait by his overbearing elder brother. After getting their stripes, they’d spent some years apart on various missions, until in 2035 they’d both been assigned to Project Uptown, a joint venture between Lionfist Corporation of the Sinosphere and Ramdhun of the Indosphere. They had been sent to Satellite City in the bleak Qinghai Desert to test what they thought were new submarine habitats, but later they learned that the structures they had suffered, frozen, sweltered and starved in were in fact the pressure hulls for the range of space hotels Lionfist had put into orbit from Satellite City through the Thirties. Yes, spinoff tech from Project Uptown had been used in the Indian Navy’s new generation of nuclear-powered megasubs, but the whole business had confirmed what Carlton had begun to suspect: the Indian Navy was now little more than a bunch of biddable beta testers for corporate tech and weapons programs. He hoped the situation wouldn’t get worse, but his nightmares called him out on that, most nights. There were so many ways in which it could get worse.

As senior officers, Carlton and Parzan were supposed to be training a new generation of submariners for the nuclear fleet, but this morning they had been ordered to join the expeditionary force to the Mudpie. Carlton couldn’t shake a feeling of doom. This mission spoke to his biggest fear: of being ordered to turn his weapons on innocent civilians. Parzan had already faced that prospect: in the later Twenties, he’d been on anti-piracy surface patrol off the coast of Kutch. He’d told Carlton how they routinely used depleted uranium shells against fishing boats full of Somali teenagers. Parzan had seriously considered leaving the Navy after that tour, but he’d been selected for submarine school in 2030, and the prospect of joining his dream service, and of serving with Carlton, had kept him back.

‘The mines are the RX2250 made by Ramdhun Robotics,’ Hammerhead was saying. ‘Each mine has a passive trigger system and a magazine of 500 rounds. They fire at a rate of one round per minute.’

Carlton felt sick. Each mine would kill everything bigger than a five-year-old child until there was nothing left that could come within fifty metres of it. It would be a death sentence not just for any humans but also for the crocs, turtles, large fish and cetaceans living around the Mudpie. All this so that Ramdhun executives could leave their champagne glasses on deck at night.

The technical specs of the mines came up. Carlton blinked and focused on the diagrams. This was no time to lose concentration. The perimeter was to be 220 km long, hugging the coast at a distance varying from 10 to 15 metres from land, terrain permitting. If there was no way to stop this, then he and Parzan would be twisting a garotte around the throat of the only truly wild place left in southeast Asia.

He pushed the rising disquiet away and listened to the mission plan. Tomorrow eight subs would start at sunrise and lay three thousand mines, give or take a smidge. The anchor points for the mines had already been drilled into the rocks by support teams. The mines would arrive on barges, and would be towed in strings by the subs. As each string reached the designated anchor point the mines would detach and deploy by themselves. All the crews had to do was check the mine’s status and move on. The mission would be complete by sundown. ‘This is a simple housekeeping task,’ said Hammerhead. ‘Try not to fuck it up.’

*

The showers at Vijaya Base were just outlets dotted around the ceiling of a brightly lit room with drains set in the floor. Carlton and Parzan stood under a shower head, back to back, soaping and rinsing themselves with the fluid precision of professional soldiers. To any inquisitive eye, they seemed perfectly well-trained, obedient cogs in the military machine, but in the hiss of the water, their lips barely moving, they talked.

‘We can’t let this happen,’ said Carlton softly. ‘But how do we stop it?’

‘You’re the engineering whiz,’ Parzan whispered back. ‘Any ideas?’

‘I need access to the tool depot.’

‘We can trash the AC unit in our mess block. While Maintenance is working you can get what you need.’

‘Worth a try.’

‘I can slingshot the fan and foul it up.’

‘Brilliant. Tonight, then.’

*

It was odd that Parzan, who’d spent his entire childhood in Mumbai, had slingshot skills which rivalled those of the proudest rural cadets he’d been to school with. The reason was Grandma Freny’s pickles. Parzan’s bedroom in their tumbledown mansion in the Backbay area was up on the roof, and his task was to watch over her fish roe pickles, her dry fruit preserves, her special baffenu mangos. Every day after school he’d sit with his slingshot and chase the crows away. He’d gotten so accurate he could drop a pebble at their feet without touching them.

At first the crows used to explode away with a raucous yell, but over time they figured out he wasn’t going to do them harm, and reduced their reaction to a token hop sideways. However, before this arms race could develop further, Parzan had gone away to Army School, which he’d hated. His slingshot skills and his expertise in horseriding, learned on his father’s stud farm, had kept him in his mates’ good books (barely) until in final year he’d transferred to the navy and turned his back on the army forever.

And now there was no Mumbai, and no Grandma Freny, both taken in different ways by climate change.

It took Parzan three tries to pot the fan in the AC vent with two rivets tied together with twine. They wrapped around the central hub like a bolas and brought the fan to a screeching halt. Outside temp was fifty degrees in the shade at almost 90 percent humidity: if you spent too long out there you could drown in your own lungs, because they were the coolest things around for water to condense on. Hammerhead firmly believed that that shit belonged on the outside of a whiskey glass, so he was soon pacing up and down the corridor and bellowing.

Carlton’s dorm mates groaned as clanging filled the air: the maintenance crews had been rousted out. No one noticed Carlton slipping away. An hour later, he returned with something the size of a large shoebox and nodded silently to Parzan.

The following morning they fell out and assembled at the submarine launch bay at sealevel. Across the narrow channel between Vijaya Base and the floating private city of New Singapore they could see the graceful struts and spars, the floating villas, the private marinas and the Formula E racecourse. New Singapore had been the first privately-owned nation, with passports, border control and foreign policy, ratified in 2029 by the UNGA in spite of a slew of pending cases before the International Courts of Justice, all pointing accusing fingers at Ramdhun Metallics for the death of Old Singapore. In those days, New Singapore had looked like an alien artefact plonked down in the Malaka Straits by some spacefaring super-empire, but now you could see the lines of rust, the wear, the welds and the algae.

In the centre towered the RSS Sardar Sarovar, the converted mega cruise vessel that housed Ramdhun Corporation’s global headquarters, command hub of the Indosphere. The Ramdhun market footprint ran from the Helmand Basin in the west to Rapa Nui in the east, and from the Himalayas to Tasmania. These days, countries mattered only when it came to sports tournaments and beauty pageants. All the important affairs of the world, such as deciding whether an island gets to live or die, were in the hands of market leaders.

Carlton and Parzan were crewing Red Two. They always got detailed together, because few of the other men wanted to work with either of them. The truth was that they were among the last of the ethnic minorities in Ramdhun’s new Indian Navy, like Gurmeet ‘Growler’ Singh who was commanding Red One. The rest had been bullied into retiring, or mysteriously become collateral damage. Growler was fearless and, as a Punjabi, was believed to be beloved of Hammerhead. This annoyed the Ramdhun execs who watched Vijaya like a hawk: they didn’t like ‘clumpings’, as they referred to any social interaction they didn’t like. But they had to put up with Hammerhead and his misfits, and Hammerhead was just wise enough and curmudgeonly enough to keep the suits at bay.

Now, as the rising sun silvered the waters beyond the Mudpie, they dived and headed out. The seas were clear of the yachts and jetskis that usually littered the suburbs of New Singapore: rich people didn’t do mornings, Parzan figured.

The munitions barges were waiting for them on the western margin of the old Marina. As they got into position behind Growler and waited to be handed a string of mines to tow, Carlton reached under his seat and pulled out the case he’d purloined. He opened it to reveal what looked like a chunky crossbow. Parzan raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s that? I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘A microwave spaller. Also known as a rock knocker. Technically mining equipment, but they use them to drill holes for underwater anchor points, like the ones our mines are going to attach to.’ Parzan watched as Carlton fitted two rabbit-ears to the spaller. ‘And this, as you know, is a laser rangefinder.’

‘What’s the plan?’

Carlton hefted the spaller. ‘While you’re busy following orders like a good soldier, I’ll slip out and visit each of those damn mines. I’ll put my spaller up against the trigger housing, use the rangefinder to target the trigger inside, then snap it off. They won’t notice a thing.’

Parzan did the math and his eyes widened. ‘There’s no way you can knock out all the hardware by end of mission. It’s eight subs against one man.’

‘I know. That’s why I need you to snag Red Two at the last minute, when we’re about to leave. Somewhere nasty, so they can’t just loop a rope around our tail and haul us out.’

‘Ugh. I suppose the Rangsang Hole is the only possible place.’

‘Yeah. Chances are, they’ll head back to base and send in the wrecker to get you out. Hopefully that’ll give me the extra time I need.’ He broke out a wetsuit and stripped down to his speedos.

Parzan’s brow wrinkled. ‘But you can’t actually see the trigger, can you? What if the rangefinder is off? You might blow yourself to pieces. This is suicide, Carlton.’ He slumped in his chair, his voice getting weaker as he realised just what Carlton was proposing. ‘There’s three thousand of them. One mistake and…’

‘I know.’

‘Stand by for mine loading,’ said the radio, while behind the stern voice of Command a ghostlier voice chirruped, ‘…and now it’s time for Merlion Masquerade! Yippee- yay! Now let’s see what Binny’s been up to since Wednesday…’ Parzan brought the sub up alongside the barge and waited for instructions. ‘I can’t let you do this.’

Tinny fairground music from the Glitch underscored Carlton’s silence, then faded. Carlton zipped up the wetsuit. Parzan’s face creased in anguish. ‘Don’t make me choose between you and the Mudpie!’

‘It’s not me making you choose. It’s this piss-poor world the richies have built around us.’ Carlton slung the spaller round his shoulders. ‘I’ll enter through a torpedo tube. Keep one clear for me.’

‘Got it. And…be careful. I don’t want to have to explain to Bilqis Bintam I let you kill yourself to save a mangrove forest.’

Carlton smiled. ‘She’ll understand. Everyone in Climate Town knows what we’re fighting for. She’d do the same in my place. I know it.’

‘Don’t die, Carlton. Just…don’t fucking die.’

Carlton hauled out the handheld jet engine and a bunch of compressed air capsules to power it. He left the scuba unit in its locker. Parzan looked doleful. ‘You’re sure you won’t take the tanks?’

‘They’ll run out long before I finish. Better to snorkel it.’ He tapped the power-snorkel, which had a tiny pump in it. It would supply him air from the surface, allowing him to swim a couple of metres down, even at top speed. He loaded his weight belt with two weights, enough to keep him at his ideal depth.

Parzan went back to listening to the radio chatter. Snatches of a game show wandered in and out of the airwaves, informing Parzan that Shirley had won ‘a new you from Ramdhun Wellness! The full exec glampack! How about that, Shirley?’ Carlton loaded his equipment into the torpedo tube and climbed in after it. As Parzan heard the thunk of the chain of five hundred mines, each the size of a basketball, latching onto his port side, he knew that Carlton had chosen that moment to open the torpedo hatch and slip out.

No takebacks from this point on. Parzan breathed deeply and let his training kick in. Red One was doing the odd points, and he would stop at the even ones. It was absurdly like driving a suburban commuter train, if your passengers were mindless assassin-machines.

Carlton stayed crouched on the underwater shelf, breathing shallowly through his snorkel, until Parzan and Growler were far enough ahead. Then he gunned the jet and followed. Below each mine, he left the jet floating at depth on its tether as he kicked gently upward, careful to avoid making lateral pressure waves. There was the ‘melon’, the sealed housing with the trigger inside it. He placed the spaller up against it and turned on the laser rangefinder. A ghostly image of the trigger appeared in his sights, really just an assurance that there was something solid at his point of triangulation. He gave the spaller a short burst and heard a faint tinkle inside the melon. Nothing happened: whew. On to the next one.

Just before diving he floated for a moment in the shadow of the melon, letting the tension ease out of him. Even through the wetsuit squeezing his ears, he could hear birds, and the croaking of frogs. The forest was just there. Come away, it said, come to me and forget the horrors you’ve witnessed, the trials that await you. Leave the damaged world of humans behind.

Two hundred and twenty kilometres in twenty four hours: that was an average of ten kilometres an hour. Do the soldier thing: just keep moving and shooting. He checked his snorkel pipe, and dived.

*

In the hours of monotonous shallow-water sailing, Parzan gave some thought to the question of how to snag the sub. He finished laying the last of his mines at the eastern mouth of the Johor Straits, completing his quadrant. Red One was a couple of kilometres ahead: he knew Growler must be cursing as he navigated the tricky, debris-clogged shallows: Johor Straits was where the wave had died, taking out the Johor Causeway as its last act of desecration. ‘Red Two returning by the Singapore Strait,’ he informed Command. ‘Johor will take too long.’ They confirmed, and he changed course.

Now he just had to go back to the Rangsang Hole and wait for Carlton to complete his circuit of the island and meet him from the other side. He followed the curve of Singapore’s coast past Batam Island. Soon he was close to the faint patch of choppy water that marked Karimunbesar Island’s grave. He gave it a wide berth: he had no desire to mess with those mines, even if Carlton had likely deactivated them.

As he entered the Hole’s blue depths and began to sink, he opened a channel and started playing ‘Ants on a Leaf’ by Bian and the Collapsineers on his deactivated phone. It was the first song the band had performed in Climate Town, back in 2018, and it had become an anthem for climate refugees everywhere. He hoped his scratchy speaker sounded like the Glitch. Hammerhead’s voice thundered over the radio. ‘Red Two, why have you altered course?’ Parzan didn’t respond.

‘The Glitch is affecting communications. Exit the Rangsang Hole immediately. Zany? Cancan? Do you copy?’ He let Hammerhead squawk. He’d spotted a giant overhang, frowning over a sort of half-cave. He backed into it at speed. He was thrown hard against the straps of his chair as his rudder and propeller mashed into the rock. Then he voided the ballast, and the sub bounced up and crushed its stubby sail against the roof of the overhang, buckling the hatch.

The sub was trapped. Depth: four point eight metres. Carlton could swim down when he returned: the nose was visible, the starboard tube clear. Over the radio, Bian, her voice small and tinny, sang to the submariners,

The winds are strong.

The sky is dark.

I hope I’m wrong,

But there might be sharks.

I know you’re mine,

And I am yours,

But it’s typhoon time,

And the ocean roars.

Ants on a leaf and we’re going nowhere.

Ants on a leaf and you don’t care.

Ants on a leaf but our love must float;

We’re ants on a tiny handmade boat.

Parzan gunned the engine again just to be sure. The propeller screeched a protest: she was a tough old boat. Hammerhead would have kittens over the bill for this one. So would Ramdhun, no doubt. He smiled: one small bright spot in the general gloom.

*

Carlton had a moment of disquiet when a school of porpoises showed up, but thankfully they slipped away through the maze of boulders, dead coral and building fragments of the Johor Strait before the mines picked up their movement. As he came out into the much wider Malaka Strait, the sun was going down in a red-gold haze. On the other side was the soft green darkness that covered Jurong Island. It was a true bird sanctuary now.

His biggest problem was the mind-numbing repetition. It was so easy to let his concentration slip: he’d had a few sick moments. He sighed with relief when his wrist unit told him the sea bed was dropping away. He was on the edge of the Hole. There were no mines here: no place to anchor them. The last few mines were waiting for him on the western tip of Karimunbesar.

That wasn’t all his wrist unit was picking up. There was also the trace of a large vessel approaching from the west. The wrecker! They were early: it was only 3am. Within minutes they’d find Parzan, since they knew his location. There was nothing for it. He would have to abort.

He didn’t slow down as he approached the last clutch of mines. The bitter taste of failure coated the back of his throat, already dry from the snorkel. Maybe the people and animals would learn to avoid this bit. He’d done the best he could.

He had bigger problems now. If they got Red Two out and towed it back to base without him, it was a courtmartial or worse for him and Parzan. Yes, there were worse things than a court martial. If they really didn’t like you, you simply disappeared.

Some good luck: his wrist unit had picked up a parabolic shape. He headed towards it and it resolved into Red Two’s hull. He couldn’t help grinning at the crazy pickle Zany had managed to get himself into.

But the wrecker was closing fast. At this rate, it would probably reach the sub before him. This was not going to work.

*

Inside Red Two, Parzan thought fast. He hailed the wrecker. ‘Stand off,’ he said. ‘Commander Caron intends to exit the vessel and assess the damage.’

‘What? That’s a no go, Zany.’ It was Growler, of course, skipping his debrief to ride back into action like a cowboy. Typical. ‘Cancan, your ass stays on board, or Hammerhead will hammer the both of you.’

‘…Glitch…ecting communic…’ Parzan was sweating now. He scratched the microphone with his fingernail. He was rapidly running out of options. Where the hell was Carlton?

Fifty metres away, Carlton shut the jet down. He unclipped the jet’s tether from his belt, took its weights and turned it, aiming straight for the nearest mine. As it sped away, he dived, hoping the mess of rocks would deflect enough of the blast.

The explosion was like the fist of god. It drove him deep. Lungs bursting, snorkel ripped away, he clawed at the water, all his worst moments from his most harrowing blackwater dives coming up at him like the spit of hell. Then his hand met rock. He clung, then climbed. Above him, Red Two’s dark bulk jutted from the debris field. He found the hatch and spun it, his lungs on fire.

If Parzan hadn’t been there to void the tube and pull him out of it, he would have drowned. He managed to give a thumbs-up as Parzan ducked under his arm and dragged him into the crew cabin. ‘You crazy bastard!’ Parzan cried. ‘Don’t ever do that again!’

Calrton waved a mute hand at the radio, which was squawking. ‘Red Two, do you copy? That was a hell of a blast. Those Robotics people don’t mess around, huh? What is your status?’

‘Cancan’s hurt.’ Parzan helped Carlton into the copilot’s seat and threw a towel over him. ‘I’ll live,’ Carlton croaked. ‘Get us out of here, Growler.’

‘Uhuhu, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when we get back to base,’ Growler chuckled. ‘Strap in, bhonsris, this could get rough.’

Magnetic grapples thunked onto the hull. Parzan turned to Carlton, who was clasping his ribs in that special way you do when it hurts to breathe. ‘Did you get them?’

‘Everywhere but the south.’ Carlton said. Then he passed out.

***