15

Rhinoworm: symbiosis, parasitism and mutualism being a feature of Spatterjay’s fauna, it is unsurprising that the rhinoworm’s life cycle begins this way. Its eggs are laid upon the stalks of the sea lily, where they inject tubules to feed upon the lily sap and thus grow. This stimulates the lily to bloom, attracting the lung birds that pollinate them. On lily sap the egg grows to the size of a football, and out of this hatches the four-limbed juvenile rhinoworm. Hatching takes place at the precise time when the lily is producing its seed pods, which, being high in protein, are much relished by many varieties of herbivorous heirodonts. Now the lily benefits from the presence of tens of thousands of voracious rhinoworms attacking any other creature in the island shallows in which it flourishes. The worms utterly denude the surrounding area and, as they begin to lose their limbs and change into the adult form, turn cannibalistic. Only 10 per cent of their original population will leave the area as adults. Rhinoworms have four sexes—three separate ‘males’ contributing three quarters of the genome to the one quarter in the female egg. Only one other life form on this world uses the same reproductive method, but no kindred spirit results, since rhinoworms are the main diet of that other arm: Spatterjay’s famous sails—

Erlin dragged herself to her feet and glanced around with some relief. The tanks had been well anchored, and—though having spilled much of their liquid contents across the floor, to mix with everything that had come in when the sea smashed through the side doors—only two of her reifs had been tossed out of them. Wading through ankle-deep water, which was swiftly draining into scuppers all around the edge of the room, she approached the first of the ejections and, not bothering to bring across the ceiling lift, untangled the various connections to his body, then picked him up and lowered him back into his tank, which was still a third full of amniot. She did the same with the second one, noting how real blood was seeping from splits caused by his recent violent departure from his tank. Then, seeing that the tank amniot levels were automatically being topped up, she began checking readouts.

To say they would survive was not entirely accurate since they were dead. But their trauma had in no way halted or even slowed the work of their nanofactories. There was something else, though: she felt a tingling soreness where the sea water from outside had soaked her. It was caused by the vicious plankton of Spatterjay, and any of the tanks that had taken in some of the incursion of sea water would now be contaminated with it. She definitely needed to do something about that, or the work of the nanofactories would be undone as the reifs themselves served as a food source for the plankton. Quickly she returned to the wreckage of her work area, found a pack of soluble tablets of a sterilizing enzyme, and dropped one in each of the twenty-two tanks currently in use. This stuff might damage the reifs, but that damage would be limited and swiftly repaired by the nanites already working in their bodies, and it would certainly kill the plankton. She then checked the readouts on the remaining twenty tanks, plugging back in a few loose sensors, but that was all she needed to do until she came to Aesop and Bones, who were safely strapped to restraint tables.

Inspecting the screens that kept her informed of the condition of the two, she realized that whatever the problem was here, it had nothing to do with the sudden storm. Both screens were scrolling what seemed the kind of formulae in which runcible technicians and AIs dabbled. She shut down Aesop’s screen, plugged in her own laptop, and sent in a diagnostic check to be sure the optic plug in the reif’s hardware had not pulled loose. It was seated firm. Turning the screen back on, she glimpsed the usual diagnostics a reif would access, before it clicked back to scrolling formulae. Erlin left it alone. She felt no great responsibility to these two, and she needed to find out what was going on outside.

‘Wow, now that’s what I call a ride!’ said Janer, who had obviously been heading for the Tank Room just as she stepped out of it. The Golem, Isis Wade, accompanied him.

‘What was that?’ Erlin asked.

‘A tsunami,’ explained Wade.

Erlin stared at him for a moment, then enquired acerbically, ‘Could you elaborate on that?’

‘According to one of the Warden’s subminds, the tsunami was caused by a kinetic missile fired down into Nort Sea from a Prador warship in orbit above us. I’m getting no more detail than that. It seems they’re quite busy up there.’

Erlin turned to Janer. ‘Why am I not surprised about that?’

Janer merely shrugged.

* * * *

‘You all right, lad?’ Ambel asked.

Pillow was looking particularly peeved, and it took the Captain a moment to realize the reason for this: the junior had lost some of his facial jewellery when he bounced down the length of the deck and slammed into the stern rail. But for a Hooper the rips in his face were minor injuries, and closing up already. Peck’s arm was broken, however, and Ambel saw the mechanic straighten it out with a crunch, then hold it taut while Anne splinted it. Peck, being an old Hooper, would only require use of the splint for a few hours.

There were other minor injuries amidst the human crew, but they had been lucky—Ambel counted heads—that none of them had gone over the side. Now he looked up and wondered if Galegrabber had survived while grabbing this particular gale, for the sail was now nowhere in sight.

‘Any sign?’ he called up to Boris, who was surveying die surrounding ocean through binoculars.

‘Not of the sails,’ Boris replied. ‘But the Moby is still afloat. They must have got their cables off the sargassum in time.’

Ambel nodded, turning to the rest of the crew, who were now mostly wandering around the deck in a daze. Their reaction was understandable—none having ever experienced weather quite that heavy, nor needed to cling onto a deck that was pitched near vertical. But this disorientation of theirs had gone on long enough.

‘All right, lads!’ he bellowed. ‘You three—Pillow, Davy-bronte and Sprout—I want the pumps up on deck and working right now. The rest of you, get down below and sort out the mess. Get everything that needs drying out up here hung on lines. Peck, I want you down below checking the racks and cogs. If Galegrabber comes back any time soon, I want everything ready and working. Take some hands with you, if you need them. Anne, I want a hull check, stem to stern—don’t miss a plank.’ They all stared at him, still a little bewildered. He clapped his hands together with sounds like gun shots, and began striding along the deck. ‘Come on, this isn’t a bloody holiday cruise! Move your arses!’ Crew members scrambled in every direction, but some still hadn’t realized he meant what he said. ‘Pillow, what are you gaping at! I see no pumps up here!’

‘But, Captain—’

Ambel picked him up by the scruff of the neck and threw him towards the nearest open hatch. Pillow hit the edge, then tumbled down inside, letting out a yell as he hit the deck below.

‘Any more questions?’ Ambel demanded.

There were none.

Over the ensuing hours, his crew pumped hundreds of gallons of sea water out of the bowels of the ship. Lines tied between the masts were loaded with soaked clothing and bedding. All this occurred to the sound of Anne’s tap-tapping as she checked the hull’s planking, and the constant clanging and occasional ‘Buggering buggered up bugger’ as Peck set about replacing one of the mast cogs which had sheared off all its teeth. Most tasks were completed by the time evening began to descend, and Boris set about lighting the recently replaced lanterns all around the deck. Ambel, who had just applied his Captain’s strength to the task of removing a stubborn cog from its shaft, came out on deck to see the Moby heading towards them, towed by its ship’s boat, which was rowed by Drum alone.

When the other Captain came within hailing distance, he called out, ‘I’ll be coming along with you!’

‘Why’s that?’ Ambel asked.

‘Out that way, the way you’re heading.’ He pointed. ‘Sprage tells me that’s where the spaceship is. Probably in the Lamarck Trench.’

‘Spaceship?’

‘Vrell’s—that bastard Prador.’

‘I see,’ said Ambel. ‘It caused this?’

‘Nope, seems the other spaceship did that,’ Drum replied.

‘Uh?’ was Ambel’s response.

Drum explained what he had learnt from Sprage about Vrell, and about the new spaceship above them, and what it had already done and might yet do. Even more so now, Ambel wanted to get to Erlin. He was grateful when, in the morning, a bedraggled Galegrabber and the Moby’s sail returned, with muttered curses, to occupy their masts.

* * * *

It took Janer a moment to recognize the vicious drumming sound. Clutching a glass of a more refined version of seacane rum than he was accustomed to, he stepped out of the bar area recently opened on the first level of the stern deckhouse. Glancing to one side, he noted some of Bloc’s Kladites—probably set to watch those frequenting the bar—now peering over the side. He moved to the rail to take a look himself, then halted. There was something sitting on the rail.

It looked like a partially plucked crow that someone had nailed in place because it had been dead for a week or more. Then it turned its head and regarded him with pink, blind-looking eyes, before honking loudly and winging raggedly away. It left behind it the stink of decay.

‘Lung bird,’ explained Ron, stepping up beside him.

‘I know what it was,’ Janer muttered.

‘We’ll have to get off here soon, before things get too hectic,’ Ron added.

‘Hectic?’ Janer queried. ‘Because of lung birds?’

Ron led the way to the rail and pointed a thumb downwards. ‘No . . . them.’

Janer peered over the side to see one of the hull laser turrets swinging back into its hold position. Pieces of some pink anguine form thrashed, still steaming, in the sea, then a shoal of leeches dragged them down. Janer squinted, puzzled, sure that he had seen a limb amongst those remains, yet the swarming creatures were rhinoworms, which were limbless. Further along, he saw another laser turret fire, then distantly he heard one from the other side of the ship.

Ron pointed out towards the lily-like plants all around the ship. ‘Breeding area, that. There’ll be thousands of the leggy buggers.’ He took his comlink from his pocket and spoke into it. ‘How we doin’ there, John?’

From the link a tired voice replied, ‘I will get it, but I can’t give you any estimate on the time. The programming is rather convoluted.’

‘Okay, keep at it.’

Ron put the link away, then seeing Janer’s querying expression said, ‘Bloc is behaving very strangely and being stupidly uncooperative. He’s refused to give us access to the ship’s computer systems, even though that’ll get us out of this mess. Maybe he’s frightened to hand over any further control.’

‘And why would access to the ship’s computer systems help?’ asked Isis Wade, who had just joined them.

It had been Wade who had kicked in the door and suggested rather loudly that here were facilities it seemed a shame not to use. He also served the first drinks, before starting up a metalskin barman that had been stored under the bar. The place had become a regular watering hole for Hoopers just coming off-shift from clearing up the mess below—there had been little damage to the hull itself, much to Captain Ron’s surprise.

Ron glanced at the Golem. ‘As you know, there’s more to this ship than Windcheater would be happy about. Now, that John Styx is a clever one, knows more coms coding and programming than probably even you, Wade. He used to do that stuff on Klader before the Polity AIs got there, and before he fell off a mountain ... So he tells me.’

‘And the relevance?’ Wade asked.

Ron gestured down the entire length of the Sable Keech. ‘Only the front half is grounded on the bottom. Once Styx cracks Bloc’s codes, we should be able to start the engines in reverse, and maybe that’ll pull us back into deep water.’

‘Engines,’ said Janer, nodding. Other Hoopers had already speculated that might be what was concealed under the enormous sealed housing forward of the rudder hydraulics. ‘What sort of engines?’

‘The usual kind—does it matter?’ Ron then downed a large slug of rum before heading back into the bar.

Isis Wade followed the Captain, but Janer stayed observing the two organic sails, Huff and Puff, winging out over the sea. He watched them for a moment, then gazed up ahead into the rigging. All the fabric sails were reefed and everything above appeared skeletal. The Golem sail, Zephyr, stood motionless like some folded piece of iron equipment affixed on a spar. Janer patted his hand against the gun concealed under his jacket, and considered the dangerous game Isis Wade was playing. Should he allow it to continue? He lowered his hand; any intervention might be provocative in the present uneasy circumstances. Better instead to wait and watch. He returned his attention to the sea, and watched Puff scoop up a great spaghetti tangle of writhing pink shapes. Then he glanced down again and saw a man-length rhinoworm, with thin newt-like limbs, attempt to climb the hull, before being lasered into smoking segments. He supposed he should not be surprised that this world had yet to reveal to him all its teeth.

Returning inside, Janer observed the small group of Kladites now sitting around a table—probably positioned there to note down the identities of those who were breaking the curfew Bloc had tried to impose. No one had been punished as yet, so perhaps Bloc was wary of upsetting the uneasy truce for the moment. Like the other reifs scattered around the room, the Kladites sipped through straws pure ethanol drinks to complement the balm inside them. He had seen Sable Keech do the same, ten years ago, and wondered if they too possessed the facility to feel or emulate inebriation. He walked past that table and went over to stand with Erlin, Ron and Wade.

‘I just saw a rhinoworm with legs,’ he commented.

Erlin turned to him. ‘The juvenile form. They grow up in island nurseries, like this one surrounding us, and lose their legs as they go fully pelagic.’

‘They’re going to give us trouble,’ Janer stated.

‘They don’t mind snacking on each other,’ said Ron. ‘Our problem is that every time those autolasers hit one, its remains attract even more.’

‘Will there be many of them here?’ Janer asked.

Erlin replied, ‘The adults gather in places like this en masse, and each one lays tens of thousands of eggs under the leaves or on the stalks of those plants you see out there. There’s probably millions of juvenile rhinoworms around this island.’

‘There’s always the thought to consider that we might be better off somewhere ashore,’ Janer said, passing his glass back to the barman—the metalskin android was fashioned in blued metal with a flattened ovoid head and scanning red eyes. It looked like a prill mounted on the neck of a humanoid body.

‘You did notice that they’ve got legs?’ said Erlin dryly.

‘Yeah, but I wasn’t thinking about that. What if that Prador captain above us decides to ignore the Warden and continue its bombardment?’ The Warden had lately updated them on recent events. ‘How many more of those waves can this ship endure?’

‘And where would we go, once we’re ashore?’ asked Ron.

Janer thought about that for a moment: the devastation visible over the island, the steam rising from the caldera somewhere behind the highest point on the island.

‘Okay, dumb idea, I guess,’ he allowed.

Janer now considered revealing to Erlin and Ron what he had learnt from Wade—he trusted these two absolutely and felt the Golem should do the same—but just then there came disturbing sounds from outside, as of all the lasers firing at once.

‘Ah, that’s it.’ Ron took out his comlink and strode to the door. Janer, Erlin and Wade followed the Captain, and this caused a general exodus from the bar. The racket originated from the sea below, so everyone moved to the rail to look over. Janer was expecting to witness some massed attack from leggy rhinoworms, but what he saw was the sea boiling towards the stern, just forward of the rudder. Large chips of wood kept bobbing to the surface amidst a spreading slick of sawdust.

‘Is that supposed to happen?’ asked Erlin. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it such a good idea to make holes in the hull.’

Wade explained for her. ‘The propellers are made of case-hardened ceramal. They’re mounted on telescopic shafts housed in watertight compartments inside the hull. When activated, they just bore their own way out through the hull. A concealed engine Windcheater could make no objection to, but evident propellers would be a little too much.’

‘How did you know all this?’ Erlin gazed at Ron, Wade and Janer in turn.

Janer shrugged. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Styx broke into the ship’s concealed plan a while ago,’ said Ron. ‘It’s just the control codes we’ve been after, since.’

‘And this will pull us free?’ Erlin glanced back at the boiling sea.

‘If we don’t run out of power first,’ replied Ron, watching the lasers turn more of the walking rhinoworms into macaroni.

* * * *

The trench was now right below Sniper and slowly the error messages from his S-cav drive were blinking out. He descended a cliff that sprouted seaweed trees in the branches of which shoals of boxies swam like mobile silver apples. Passing a deep cave, he observed two large eyes watching him, and an ultrasound scan rendered him the strange image of something like a giant whelk, sans shell, protecting its softer body in stone like some kind of hermit crab. Finally reaching the bottom, he scanned at full power with each of his senses, then again picked up something in ultraviolet.

Prador were riddled with tactical blind spots—it was this that had once enabled Sniper to defeat a number of Ebulan’s drones, even though they carried superior firepower and armour—and he suspected this was how he would now find the hidden spaceship. Doubtless Vrell had concealed it in a deeper part of the trench, but what the Prador had failed to conceal were the leaking radioactives, which were thick in the water here. Choosing the direction from which the current seemed to be sweeping the isotopes, he headed off. Then, ahead of him, against the base of a rocky underwater cliff, he spotted the painfully bright glare of some large pill-shaped metallic object.

Sniper scanned his find briefly, quickly realizing it was a dumped fusion reactor—its casing cracked and the isotope ash of its last faulty burn poisoning both itself and now its surroundings. Around this object the bottom was littered with dead and dying creatures: some small varieties of whelk and bleached-white heirodonts no bigger than a human arm. Checking his records the drone realized these were creatures whose vision extended into the ultraviolet. They had been attracted by the light—and it had killed them.

‘Fuckit,’ Sniper muttered, moving on.

The reactor could have been dumped during the journey along the trench, so the ship itself could be many kilometres from here. Almost with a sigh, Sniper transmitted his findings to the Warden, then continued trundling along just above the bottom.

The AI on Spatterjay’s moon responded immediately. ‘You must find that ship soon. The Prador captain is becoming impatient. His drones and his armoured Prador have dropped to the stratosphere, and I don’t think they will hold there for long.’

‘This could be a good sign,’ said Sniper. ‘If Vrell had considered the possibility of this reactor being found, he’d have concealed it better. It could be that it was only carried a minimal distance from the ship itself, and then dumped.’

He now reached the base of a rubble slope in the trench. The remaining error messages in his S-cav drive now merely concerned his jammed ports. This meant weaknesses in his armour, but did not mean the drive itself would not work.

‘That is a possibility arising from optimism rather than logic,’ opined the Warden huffily.

Sniper sent back a U-space raspberry and continued searching.

Halfway up the slope the drone spotted a small shoal of those heirodonts encountered earlier near the reactor. The water was disturbed and murky around them as they fed upon something. Admitting the possibility of finding another human corpse, though by the readings in ultraviolet not a radioactive one, Sniper motored over.

The heirodonts dispersed, then circled round again—loath to leave their meal. Revealed was an adult frog whelk, much the size of Sniper himself, its shell crushed under the edge of a large slab of rock. What remained of its extended foot still moved weakly, but its eyes were gone and what he could see of its main body, inside the broken shell, was in tatters. Even while he watched, more of those same heirodonts fled from cracks in the whelk’s shell. The creatures would not have been able to feed on the whelk in any other circumstance. He suspected that having most of its main body eaten had weakened it sufficiently for them to go to work on its tough appendage.

But there was nothing else important for him here.

Sniper noted another shoal now coming down towards him. That whelk would not last much longer—would never get the chance to regenerate as did so many of the animals here. Then it hit him: why was the whelk trapped underneath this slab? This slope of rubble must be a recent fall—but what had caused it? Yes, probably the shock wave, but maybe something else. Suddenly back on alert, Sniper opened his scan all around him. The moment it touched the descending shoal, that shoal accelerated. These fish were not flesh—they were black and too evenly shaped—and no creature down here propelled itself by a constant water jet.

Sniper spun upright, put his S-cav drive online, and accelerated upwards in an explosion of silt which disappeared amidst more silt rising, as the very ocean began to shake. Explosions nearby knocked out the cone-field of his drive, and set him tumbling for a moment. He saw further explosions below turning the whelk into mincemeat and slivers of shell. The remainder of the swarm of mini-torpedoes now swerved towards him.

‘Found it!’ he sent over U-space.

Below him an avalanche revealed a rising curved edge of metal, and the constant blast along the trench from some massive turbine.

‘Get out of there, Sniper,’ the Warden replied. ‘I’ve so far dissuaded our friend from using his coil-gun, but as soon as he knows about this, I suspect he’ll change his mind.’

‘That’s my—’

An explosion right next to him again knocked out Sniper’s cone-field, even as he began to generate it. He scanned for other missiles, could see nothing, then whipped a tentacle through the dispersing cloud of the explosion and drew in, through microtubes, a sample for his internal spectrometer.

Ceramic missiles?

Suddenly every moving object around him could prove a threat—missiles fired at him did not have to be metallic. He blew out a cloud of antimunitions beads and motored sideways, scanning behind and below for the precise source of the attack, which had to have originated from somewhere on the rising titanic spaceship now filling the trench from side to side. However, the focused ultrasound pulses hit him from above. They struck the end of one of his large tentacles and tracked in, paralysing that limb then scrambling some of his internal systems when they reached his main body. He loaded and fired hunting torps upwards directly towards the triangulated source, which was behind a spreading cloud of mercury chaff. The source then speared into view, launching another ultrasound pulse. It was another torpedo.

Sniper veered, angling his course upwards at forty-five degrees away from some rising monolithic extension of the Prador ship. Rerouting internal systems knocked out by ultrasound attack, he made for the edge of the chaff cloud, as his attacker was almost certainly behind it. After firing a couple of torps towards the further edge of the cloud, these missiles being programmed to go around it and intercept whatever they found there, he loaded antimunitions. Rounding the cloud, he opened up with his own ultrasound weapon. He hit one of his own seeking torps and it blew in a flat explosion. The other one kept circling, sniffing for prey that was not here. Just then, rather than communicate, the Warden relayed a recent exchange, compressed to be read at high speed directly into Sniper’s mind:

‘If you fire now, you will be destroying a seven-hundred-year-old Polity citizen and ECS employee. You will also kill the crews of two Hooper ships, the Polity passengers and Hooper crew of another larger vessel—and cause untold environmental damage.’

‘There is only a drone down there. A few of these Hoopers are not your responsibility. And these so-called Polity citizens, from what I have recently learnt, are nothing more than animated corpses.’

‘Nevertheless, I will be forced to employ a U-space weapon, should you fire. It will certainly destroy the projectile as it leaves the coil-gun, but I estimate it will also revolve half of your ship’s bulk into underspace then back out again, inverted.’

Almost to the microsecond of Sniper finishing the package, a torp streaked up out of the chaff cloud and exploded against his underside.

Where the fuck are you?

Sniper reserved his shots until he saw a clear target. He began motoring rapidly to the surface, with the pretence of drawing his attacker away from the chaff cloud. In reality he knew the cloud was a decoy to make him think the attacker was there. And after the Warden’s message he had no wish to hang around playing cat and mouse, especially as he seemed to have now taken on the mouse role. Some five hundred metres above the rising Prador ship he fired two missiles towards the cliff-side nearest to him, then focused his scanners below the tumbling rock fall that ensued.

Nothing.

He came up out of the trench, again trying to restart his S-cav drive. It came close to engaging, then the cone-field collapsed in a cascade of errors. He put this, and some of the weird readings he was getting on sonar, down to ultrasound damage. He began motoring to one side to get out of the way of the Prador ship. It was now elevated above the trench and sliding sideways, tonnes of rubble and silt pouring from it. Sniper decided he should head for the surface as fast as he could; at least in the air he would be able to use his fusion engine. Then something stopped him dead, as if he’d run into an invisible brick wall.

Invisible.

Sniper remembered the recording from SM12, just before that drone was destroyed. It had seemed the Prador war drone had moved off very quickly—because one moment it was there and the next moment gone.

‘Fuck,’ said Sniper, as a huge exotic metal claw folded out of nowhere and clamped on the forward edge of his shell. ‘Chameleonware.’

The Prador war drone appeared in one rippling wave, and Sniper immediately fired a contact torp directly towards it. The explosion blasted the two drones aside in a spinning course. The Prador drone’s exotic armour developed a glowing dent, but the shock wave, turning him against the gripping claw, bent Sniper’s armour where it was clamped. A square port opened in the bigger drone and now a torp slammed into Sniper, causing a similar dent. The big drone tried to bring its other claw to bear. Sniper wrapped two tentacles around it, and underwater arm wrestling ensued. Through another tentacle touching the base of that claw Sniper directed the discharge from one of his inner laminar batteries, but the instant he did that, a similar shock slammed into him through the other claw. They were hurtling towards the surface now, born their drives applied to the same task: the Prador drone to get a potential attacker away from its ship, Sniper because he did not want to be in the vicinity of an orbital strike. Despite the shock, however, Sniper still had another option.

‘Let’s see you hang on now,’ he sent.

He initiated his S-cav field, part of it intersecting the other drone, then opened his tractor drive to full power. Within seconds their speed doubled, and they continued accelerating. Some tightly focused ultrasound weapon began gnawing at Sniper’s armour just behind his head. Sniper injected aluminium-film chaff between, to soak up some of the energy. Then they exploded from the ocean’s surface. The field stuttered, went out, and Sniper engaged his fusion drive. That wrench was enough and, peeling away a piece of Sniper’s armour, the big drone tumbled away, snapped taut Sniper’s gripping tentacles, then fell again when the Polity drone released his hold. But, with a flash of white fire, the Prador engaged its own fusion engines and came on, now firing missiles and lasers.

Employing a hard-field, Sniper smacked the missiles out of the air, and replied with his APW. Violet fire splashed on his opponent’s hard-field, then it replied with its own APW blast. Sniper fired a missile which, exploding, caused a massive directional electromagnetic pulse. He was about to follow up with another APW blast, hopefully cutting through his opponent’s defences, which should have been knocked out by the pulse, when the two missiles he had knocked away earlier tried to hit him from the ocean below, where they had been waiting for this. One he shot down with a laser, but the other exploded just underneath him, delivering a similarly disabling EM pulse.

Not such a pushover, thought Sniper.

Reaching then exceeding the speed of sound, the two opponents hurtled over the ocean, leaving a trail of ionized gas, smoke and falling flakes of white-hot armour.

* * * *

The coil-gun on the Prador ship was charged and ready to fire, and the Warden had no way of stopping it other than by firing on Vrost’s ship with conventional weapons—thus revealing a lack of anything else effective—or by further bluffing.

‘The seven-hundred-year-old drone is now no longer in the way,’ Vrost informed him.

Sniper’s departure from the scene had been all too evident, and the Warden supposed that the old drone was probably about as happy as he could ever be.

‘That still does not negate my original assertion. Vrell’s ship is now much closer to the Sable Keech and the two Hooper ships, and should you fire, the deaths of those aboard the three vessels would be certain,’ said the Warden calmly.

With another part of itself, the AI observed one of the armoured Prador as it drifted close to one of many orbital eyes, for it was not often that one of this kind got so close to Polity scanning equipment, and such an opportunity should not be missed.

Certainly, if the King’s household was organized along the same lines as others of his kind, all his guards would be first-, second- and third-children. There were no fourth-children, as any that survived the ruthless selection process in a Prador brood cave was automatically designated a third-child. The casualty rate being approximately 90 per cent for each generation, out of a thousand Prador nymphs in a brood only a hundred would survive the savage selection process so as to become third-children, while ten would survive to become second-children, and one would get to be a first-child. What this ensured was self-evident, for in the lifetime of an adult Prador, which could be as long as eight hundred solstan years, three to four hundred broods would be engendered. However, first-children rarely made it to adulthood since they were generally killed by their father around their fiftieth year of life, before they could make that final step. This meant that, at any one time, a single adult Prador should have a maximum of twenty-five first-children attending on it. Speculation in the Polity had always been rife about King Oboron and his guard, since the King was older than any other known Prador, with his first-children numbered in the thousands, and all of them wearing that concealing armour.

‘Again,’ Vrost replied, ‘Hoopers are not your concern, and the passengers of that ship are already dead.’

‘I must warn you I cannot allow you to use that coil-gun,’ said the Warden, groping around for something more to add. ‘And I must also ask whether this behaviour is what passes for diplomatic relations amongst your kind. Would your King be pleased with your actions here—and the way you are threatening the new alliance between the Polity and the Third Kingdom?’

Vrost was a long time in replying, and during this delay the Warden attempted some gentle probing of the armoured Prador.

The most probable explanation for the current King and his extended family was that he had discovered some form of longevity but denied it to all but his immediate kin, and that this same serum, process or surgical technique had also stalled his kin’s maturation. This had occurred with some of the earlier anti-geriatric medications used by humans. Specifically there had been a nanotech process—similar to the nanofactories used by reifications—which had read the DNA of its host, then perpetually worked to repair any subsequent damage to that DNA. The disadvantage here was that if the DNA was already damaged before this reading process, the nanomachines would maintain that damage. This meant that someone suffering from cancer would then always have cancer, for any attempt at correction at a genetic level would be defeated by the nanobots. It also meant that if someone took such treatment while a child, he or she would then remain forever a child.

The armour was near impenetrable: a thick layer of exotic metal sandwiching alternate layers of a superconductor and some other reflective exotic metal. The Warden tried low-level radar and microwave scans, but once the AI upped the intensity of those, the Prador clearly sensed them, because it turned to face the nearby satellite eye and projected microwave and radio white noise. But there remained another possibility.

The Warden slowly began altering the position of the nearest satellite eye, to bring it away from the armoured Prador but down into the same level of the ionosphere. Further around the planet, it dropped another eye to the same level.

‘Prador do not participate in diplomacy,’ Vrost replied. ‘This must be settled quickly.’

Shit, thought the Warden.

‘Now,’ Vrost continued, ‘that I have obliged you, I would prefer it if you made no further attempt to scan Father’s second-children.’

One strange piece of information there: the Warden had assumed, by the size of this armoured Prador, that it must be a first-child. The AI then initiated the X-ray scan from his further eye, while using the closer eye as a receiver. The fusion detonation came a microsecond after, converting the armoured second-child into a glowing ball of gas. The flash knocked out the reception on most nearby satellite eyes.

‘I repeat,’ said Vrost, ‘attempt no scans.’

Either suicide or remote detonation initiated by Vrost, the Warden realized. ‘My apologies, that scan was initiated before your warning.’

The AI was betting on the Prador not comprehending exactly how fast an AI could react. For a moment Vrost gave no reply, and the Warden studied the X-ray picture he had obtained. It was not very clear, but certainly showed that the armour had not conformed to the shape of the being it contained. That looked nothing like any Prador second-child.

‘The ocean ship survived the wave caused by my first strike,’ said Vrost. ‘Another strike would only be four hundred kilometres closer and, impacting on a spaceship near the surface, I have just calculated that its detonation would not cause so large a wave.’

The Warden found himself all out of bluffs. Either Vrost believed the AI could use U-space weapons or he did not. There was nothing more the AI could do, and Vrost, it seemed, did not believe him. The coil-gun fired again.

Tracking the missile down through the atmosphere, the AI made its own calculations and realized that the Prador captain might just be right, so long as no weapons or fusion reactors detonated aboard Vrell’s ship. Then something unexpected happened, and the AI observed the projectile become a streak of incandescent gas.

‘It would seem that Vrell’s shipboard weapons are perfectly functional,’ the Warden remarked.

After a long delay, Vrost replied, ‘Yes, so it would appear.’

* * * *

Something cataclysmic had certainly occurred here in the sea. The giant whelk recognized the signs by something buried deep in her memory. She recollected, long in the past, grey sulphurous fountains spewing from sea-floor vents around which gathered strange green prill and enormous pale clams. Near her, magma had wormed up from the deep ocean floor with a sound like something huge tearing apart. Hints of its inner glow showed through the immediate crust it acquired on contact with the sea water, and it hardened into stone pillars that then toppled one after another. All this had been a curiosity to nearby whelks, until one of them had ventured close enough to grab one of the clams. That rash individual was caught in a stray current of water which, but for the pressure, would have been steam. It died with one long-drawn-out squeal, before floating upwards inflated by its own cooking gases. The rest of the whelks fled.

Here, around her now, drifted the remnants of parboiled leeches, cooked-red segments of glister and hinged-open prill carapaces. Down below she observed the skeleton of a heirodont and felt a surge of gladness -as she well knew, such monsters did not die easily, so what had caused this ablation of its flesh must have been strong indeed. Now all that was left of that drastic event was unusual warm-water currents cutting through the devastation. But the ocean was gradually returning to normal and, like herself, its denizens were venturing into this area to feed on the organic detritus.

First came the turbul, crunching open both shell and carapace to get at the broiled meat inside. Then came shoals of boxies, swarming like silver bees as they picked through this cornucopia in the water and juggled clean any pieces of shell the turbul dropped. Glisters remained distant, keeping well clear of the whelk herself, but prill she had to perpetually slap away. A heirodont, half the size of the one she had beheaded, cruised into view then turned towards her. She prepared her garrotte and waited, as the thing circled twice, clacking its mandibles. Holding the line out towards it, drawn taut between two tentacles, she sculled round to stay facing it. Then it attacked.

Her line cut into the slope of its head as it drove her rapidly back up through the water, then along the surface, kicking up spray from the heaving ocean. Its mandibles kept groping only a small distance from her body. When it eventually slowed, she relaxed the line’s tension, sculled neatly round beside the creature’s head and looped the line around its neck. It was easier with this smaller attacker than the previous occasion, and the line did not snag on any vertebrae this time. A second heirodont arrived just in time to see the whelk pushing off from the thrashing body of her attacker while its head spiralled down towards the bottom, trailing ichor as grey as any spume from a volcanic vent. As the second heirodont quickly turned away, she felt joy not so much because of this victory but because the attacker had propelled her to this particular area of ocean. For, sticking out her corkscrew tongue, she savoured a familiar taste in the water.

The ship.