‘Look, flowers,’ said Erlin, continuing to munch on the steak she had retained. When she finally finished it, and licked her fingers clean, she saw that her digits had become much the same blue as the blossoms below, and acknowledged that maybe Zephyr was carrying her because he was the only one safe in doing so now.
‘Lilies,’ said Zephyr. ‘Of course.’
The giant whelk closely focused one of her dinner-plate eyes on the ceramo-carbide hook embedded in the tip of her tentacle. The thing had actually ripped through her flesh; nothing else had caused her such damage in a very long time. This only made her angrier, as certainly this hook, and its ten metres of line attached, had come from the ship above her. She had seen turbul being hauled up there and in all the excitement had tried grabbing one. Big mistake. She then recalled other injuries she had suffered: memories reawakened in the newly functioning lobes of her brain.
The brood comprising herself and her siblings had been large, but over the years had been whittled down. Initially, nearly all the other denizens of the ocean had presented a problem to them. Leeches, given the opportunity, would snatch plugs of flesh; prill often planed through to scythe off the occasional tentacle of the unwary. She herself had lost a tentacle that way, but soon regrew it. Turbul took half their number, avoiding only those whose shells had hardened sufficiently, like her own. Glister ambushes took her kin, but only when the parent went off to feed its gargantuan appetite. One once attacked her, too, but had been unable to dislodge her. Then, beginning their long migration into the depths, they began to mature and grow stronger. In time her own skin became too tough for leeches to penetrate, and her shell too hard for turbul to crack. Only larger prill and glisters managed to snatch away the odd tentacle, but that soon became a dangerous option for them, as even they eventually became prey for herself and her kin. But deeper down the brood soon learnt that there were other, larger predators.
A monstrous heirodont had assailed and crunched down many of them before the parent attacked it. The giant whelk remembered that battle, remembered hiding in a crevice with her shell broken and ichor leaking out around her, attracting prill. She remembered the death screams, then a long silence before finally her parent’s shell tumbled down the slope past her, utterly cleaned out. She stayed in the crevice until her own shell healed, feeding on anything that got close enough. Then she emerged and dragged herself down to rejoin her own kind below.
The giant whelk again studied the hook and saw that quickly forming scar tissue had sealed it in place. Whipping her tentacle back she observed the line looping above her. Different movements of her tentacle caused changing patterns in the line: there a sine wave travelling its length, and there an endlessly revolving coil. These patterns pleased her, and rather than tear the hook out, she drew the line back and wrapped it around her tentacle.
8
Packetworms:
these segmented worms obtain most of their nutrition by boring through compacted mud layers and sedimentary rock. It is theorized that the evolutionary pressures driving them into this lifestyle were in force before the rise of the leeches. A billion years ago, after five billion years of competitive evolution and no mass extinctions, Spatterjay was seemingly overburdened with life, resulting in every possible niche being competed for and exploited. Few people have actually seen living specimens of this creature, its home environment being far below the seabed, but they do make their presence known. The casts they throw up—of ground rock, calcined limestone and clay—are of a similar composition to cement, and set as hard. And since some packetworms grow to two metres wide and fifty long, those worm casts can be large enough to protrude from the ocean surface. Their almost cubic configuration has in the past caused them to be mistaken for the ruined buildings of some alien race, and they form the foundations of many atolls and even some islands on Spatterjay. The packetworm’s physical biology, working five degrees hotter than that of most other native forms, and being highly acidic, is inimical to the Spatterjay virus -
The SMs numbered six to ten, in their standard format geosurvey shells, were not built for speed as that was not necessary for them to catch or escape rocks. Each of them measured two metres from top to base, and about a metre wide. If they bore a resemblance to anything, it was, with numerous blocky additions, to ancient paraffin tilley lamps sprayed sky green. They were also now devoid of the ‘attitude’ program they had run while occupying enforcer shells and attacking the Prador ship ten years ago. They were also unarmed.
‘Okay, you lot,’ Sniper addressed them. ‘Keep searching for that Golem. I’ll get back to you.’
‘Yes, Sniper,’ they all replied at once.
‘Eleven, Twelve, you’re with me,’ Sniper then sent.
SM12 had been the Warden’s lieutenant during that crucial battle a decade earlier, and though being physically destroyed, had yet managed to upload from its cockleshell drone body. When Sniper displaced the Warden he did not subsume the surviving SMs, but allowed them to choose their own course. Twelve opted for a new body much like its previous one, but a scallop shell this time, two metres across. Eleven, having missed all the action while acting as a signal-relay station, decided on a drone shell made in the mythical dolphin shape more commonly seen as a door knocker than in any ocean, but one two metres long. Both of them were armed with needle rail-guns and lasers, both of them possessed fusion boosters, and both of them had loaded a slightly adjusted version of ‘attitude’.
Sniper turned in mid-air, watching the drones approach. Twelve had opened his shell to fold out two boosters, and was hammering towards him rearwards. Eleven’s booster was positioned with anatomical humour. Sniper transmitted coordinates to them, then accelerated, and the drones adjusted their course to match his.
‘Problem, boss?’ asked Eleven.
‘Seems the Vignette might have burned and sunk,’ said Sniper.
‘Could we be the cause?’ asked Twelve. ‘That Captain did seem to resent us, and his crew weren’t in any hurry to cut him down.’
‘Maybe we were the catalyst,’ Sniper allowed. ‘That’s what we’ll find out.’
As they hurtled across the sky, Sniper transmitted to them all that the Warden had sent him.
‘Underneath thick cloud,’ Twelve mused. ‘It would be interesting to find out how many other ships have been in a similar position recently.’
‘I did check,’ said Sniper.
‘How many?’ asked Eleven.
‘None,’ Sniper replied.
Within an hour they were hovering over the sea twenty kilometres east of the last known coordinates of the Vignette. The cloud was dispersed now, and the sun a watery green eye above them.
‘Why here?’ asked Eleven.
‘The bottom’s two kilometres down and the current easterly,’ Sniper said. ‘The ship ain’t going to be directly below where it sank. Can you both pressure seal?’
‘Can do,’ said Eleven.
‘It was how I was designed before, and how I am designed now,’ said Twelve.
The three of them dropped towards the waves.
‘We’ll use U-space com. Stay alert, and keep all your detectors at maximum range,’ Sniper ordered, just as all three of them splashed down.
They stabbed into the sea, punching white-water trails like icicles, then allowed themselves to drift and sink with the current. Sniper scanned the other two, to witness Twelve retracting its boosters, and Eleven becoming stone rigid. Both of them would be filling their interstices with crash foam and adjusting other internal structures to withstand the pressure. The old war drone himself briefly tested his underwater tractor drive, and left his ports open to the water. He was itching for an excuse to use his supercavitation field, but supposed reluctantly that travelling at mach three underwater would not help him find the Vignette any quicker. He also opened his various weapons ports, to prevent sudden pressure inclusions should he need to shoot anything. Opening a port, with normal air pressure inside, to sea water under high pressure, was not a good idea, especially if you were in the process of trying to rapidly launch a mini torpedo. Also, the tractor drive needed its internal pressures equalized to its environment in order to function quickly and efficiently. But this was all the preparation he needed. Most of his new body was as dense as iron with very few air spaces, and his shell could take a great deal more than the water pressure he would find two kilometres down.