‘Feeling mortal yet?’ Ambel asked her.

Suddenly Erlin’s body was drenched in cold sweat. Yes, she could walk on the boundary of oblivion, but the moment she stepped over it… nothing. And how easy would it be? If she ended up in the ocean, she could become a stripped-fish. If the whelk held onto her it would eat her alive. She turned and ran.

‘Get this fucking ramp up!’ Ron bellowed into his comlink.

The ramp stair was vibrating underneath Erlin as the tentacle smashed through the walkway behind her. Then the stair was collapsing even as she scrambled up it. Then it was folding back underneath the main deck, as she leapt the gap up onto the planking.

‘Aargh, that smarts,’ said Drum, holding his quite obviously broken arms away from his body. He had put them out ahead of him to break his fall—and they had. Erlin supposed she would soon be using one of her Hooper programs in an autodoc.

‘Was that all part of some plan?’ Janer asked Ron, still holding his gun as he peered over the rail.

Straight-faced, Ron replied, ‘Not about that bugger.’ He glanced over to where Keech had Bloc kneeling so as to face a cabin wall, the pulse gun pressed into the back of his neck. ‘We reckoned those other two would do for him.’

Erlin wondered about that. She knew this ship had the facility to detect something the size of that whelk moving about below. And she remembered Ron’s furtive use of his comlink. The problem was, being an Old Captain, he’d had plenty of time to practise lying, so she would probably never know for sure.

‘Hooper justice,’ stated Janer.

‘Yeah,’ said Ron, then called over to Keech, ‘Why? Why save him?’

Keech looked round. ‘I adhere to the laws I enforce.’

‘You weren’t so pernickity with Jay Hoop’s gang,’ Ron replied.

Keech grimaced, perhaps remembering his long and bloody pursuit of that gang. He said, ‘Sentence was already passed on them in their absence. It was death in every case.’

Erlin did not listen to Ron’s reply to that. The giant whelk was now wholly occupying the Little Flint, and she thought it still far too close. That single great eye remained focused on her and occasionally blinked. She wondered if she would have to leave Spatterjay to ever be free of pursuit by this monster.

‘Not the right place for it, you see.’ Ambel pointed. ‘Needs island shallows to raise its young.’

Now, almost with disinterest, the whelk turned its eye away from Erlin and, sliding over the other edge of the Flint, it dropped titanically into the sea—and was gone.

Aesop made no attempt to swim, his body being so weighed down with internal hardware. Besides, his right arm was shattered, along with many other bones in his body.

Boxies came first, following the trail of balm he was leaving behind as he sank, then swinging round him in a cubic crowd. Soon they were darting in to snatch away loose flesh from his ruptured arm, and from where other bones protruded.

WARN: CELLULAR REPAIR REQ. SHUTTING BALM FLOW AB32—46, TORSO 65–70, LT (BOTH) 71–74 -

Yeah, right.

Aesop shut off all the error messages, which were irrelevant now that the leeches were approaching.

The first one, easily the size of a human leg, crunched into his midriff. Then, in a cloud of balm, it rolled away trailing two metres of carefully preserved intestine. Next a whole shoal of its arm-sized fellows began attaching and writhing round him until he could see nothing but feeding leeches. As this shoal began at last to thin out, he held up one hand stripped of flesh—all gleaming bone and nodular joint motors—and then observed the rapidly approaching bottom. He landed with a crump on a steep slope, and tumbled down it in a cloud of silt.

Eventually coming to rest against an outcrop of flint, he looked down at his ravaged body. Leeches writhed between his ribs. He considered pulling them out, but did not see the point. Others would come to finish the job, and he would rather sooner than later that the point be reached where there was no flesh on him to attract them. Standing up, he began making his way round the slope that ascended to the Little Flint. At one point he paused, looking up, and watched the Sable Keech depart. By the time he found what remained of Bones, he was himself as skeletal as his companion had been. Bones, however, was now just a splintered ribcage with neck vertebrae and skull still attached to it.

Aesop picked him up. Now, where to go? He had no idea where the nearest shore might lie, and his power supply might give out before they reached it. This was, all things considered, the best he could hope for in the circumstances. At least he had a chance…

There were fires aboard Vrost’s ship. From a distance they looked like small blazes on a floating island, but closer observation showed they burned at the bottom of huge chasms sliced into the very structure of the leviathan vessel. The coil-gun now tilted down against the hull, some missile or massive fragment of Vrell’s vessel having cut through its supporting structure. Exposed girders glowed red, radiating into space. The ship turned as it fell away from Spatterjay, presenting its less damaged flank to the approaching swarm. Hundreds of triangular ports already stood open, into which the war drones zipped like bees returning to the hive. The com traffic was intense, since many safety and security protocols had been overridden to get all the troops back aboard and the ship safely away. Besides smoke from the fires wreathing the vessel, emissions of radioactive gas from fusion engines deliberately burning dirty, their flames shading from white to orange, helped provide it with further cover. Vrost did not want to allow the Warden time or opportunity to scan through damaged screening.

The Prador—designated by its armour’s CPU as Cverl—had managed to ascertain its destination, even though its com-system had been damaged back on the planet, and it could apparently only send base code to the others. Taking its place in a swirling galaxy of golden-armoured individuals, it fell into line as they descended towards a port. When only two of its fellows were between itself and the opening, it got its first glimpse inside the craft and saw the armoured Prador preceding it land hard on the floor plates as the ship’s gravity dragged it down. The long chamber lying beyond was crowded with others of its kind, since they would not be moving on further into the ship until the atmosphere door could be closed and air pressure restored. Air, of course, was vital, being the required fluid medium.

When its turn came, the Prador designated Cverl landed neatly, countering with its armour’s AG and then scrambling on into the crowd. Five more came down behind it, then the outer door began to draw closed. With the slow return of atmosphere, the earlier silence was replaced by the incredible racket of heavily armoured Prador crashing around the metal floor.

Such a closely packed crowd was perfect. Only one thing more was required.

Ah…

Doors all along each side of the chamber began to open, and the armoured Prador started moving off to be about their assigned tasks. Cverl’s own assignment was to collect a plasma torch and take it to a certain location to help clear wreckage. Vrell, now wearing that Prador’s armour, crushed the wedge-shaped container he held in his claw, releasing the replicating nanite he had specially adjusted to destroy the nervous systems of Prador with a particular genetic code… like all these around him. Ostensibly about to proceed where he had been directed, he paused as a scream issued over com. Glancing back, he saw one armoured Prador collapse down on its belly, while another shot off on AG to crash straight into the ceiling.

Surprisingly fast…

Sighing with satisfaction, Vrell rechecked the ship’s map in his armour’s CPU, and turned to head for Vrost’s sanctum.