As the three drones descended through clear water, leeches, streaming towards them like shoals of flat eels, grated mouthparts against their armour then dropped away. When a leech the size of a small ship started to show an interest, Sniper brought to bear a device he had been anxious to try out. Loosely based on the Prador water gun, this weapon ionized and field-accelerated a jet of superheated sea water. Sniper called it his dissuader.

‘Remember what the Warden said,’ Twelve warned him.

‘Like a few leeches less might be a problem?’

The leech came on. Underwater, its body was leaf-shaped and moved with slow undulations that swept it forward rapidly. It went for Sniper—the larger prey—its stem an extending metre-wide mouth, starting to bell out to encompass him whole. Sniper fired, and it was as if a bar of hot metal stabbed out between himself and the leech, super-heated steam exploding in enormous bubbles away from it. Where it struck, the creature’s flesh just melted away in dark clouds, retreating like butter before a blow torch.

‘An effective weapon,’ commented Twelve.

‘Now that’s gotta smart!’ exclaimed Eleven.

The leech coiled in on itself, globular, and began to ascend in a mass of bubbles. The three continued down.

Deeper, and leeches were now somnolent strands drifting in the water. Glisters swam here, but never too close. A shoal of boxies turned away with geometric precision, and a small heirodont flicked its vertical sharkish tail and swept past with its mandibles clattering. Distantly came the moan of one of its larger cousins. The water was murky now, but Sniper soon discerned a mountain range below them. They swept the bottom with refined sonar beams, looking for sign of the ship. Sniper identified slopes of shell scree, and some intact empty shells so large he could have motored inside them.

‘I’ll do a wide scan over this grid. You two search one of the squares starting here,’ he sent. The drones’ method of underwater locomotion consisted of squid jets, so they would not be able to keep up even with just his tractor drive.

‘No need,’ said Eleven, broadcasting coordinates to his two companions.

They scanned down where he indicated, found the broken mast lying on one peak, then tracked a half-kilometre slide mark down the mountainside to where lay the ship in two halves.

‘Try to find its crew—they might still be alive,’ sent Sniper.

Hoopers, he knew, might survive even this.

The two little drones circled the two separate halves of the vessel, then entered one half each. Sniper held back, mapping the wreckage and building three-D models in his cortex. There, he brought the two halves together, correcting for damage obviously caused by it striking the underwater mountain and its long slide down here. It took him only moments to discern that something had exploded inside it.

‘No one here,’ said Twelve.

‘Not a single one,’ added Eleven.

Sniper closed in on one half, centering himself over where the explosion had occurred. He reached out with a tentacle and picked up one charred pearwood beam, then ran another tentacle over its burnt surface. The dense sea water all around prevented him using his laser spectrometer, so he drew in a small sample through a microtube, up through his tentacle and inside himself to analyse in his internal spectrometer. He removed from the results the signature for carbonized pearwood, then for burnt sea-gourd resin, leech and turbul ichor, and anything else commonly found on Hooper ships. Soon he had fined down the results to certain elements in certain proportions. Some kind of explosive, but this told him nothing he had not already guessed. He tried another sample at a different location, while Eleven and Twelve searched the surrounding area for any stripped fish. His fifth try revealed a definite spike for an uncommon element. It was one of the exotic metals; one of those discovered by humans only after they had left the solar system, but which another race had discovered long before. Sniper recognized it instantly—enough of it having been shot at him over the years.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no survivors here.’

Having lost one claw, a few hands, a large proportion of shell and very nearly his life to an Old Captain called Drum, Vrell was bemused by the behaviour of his captives. But then perhaps this was the way all Hooper crews behaved: as meek as Prador children controlled by their father’s pheromones? No, that wasn’t right. Prador children were only meek towards their own father, not to some outside threat. The prisoner Captain himself was not so obliging, and had twice escaped Vrell’s grasp. But why did he not order his crew to attack? It was all very strange.

Vrell had chosen to use spider thralls. He knew the danger, but the benefits of using blanks with some autonomy outweighed it. Anyway, before any of these humans rejected their thralls he would fully core them. But, right now, the first three he had enslaved he needed to immediately put to work. Thralling the others would have to wait.

The first blank he programmed to be a pilot, the second a navigator, and the third an engineer controlling below him the two blanks recently resident in the larder. The first two now stood at the rebuilt consoles in the control section. The third waited, with patches and welders, near the ship’s weak point—where it had been penetrated. Vrell himself monitored the overall systems of the ship. It was a relief to relinquish some control, yet running three more slave units shell-welded under his carapace presented different difficulties. It required a light touch and eternal vigilance. When the navigator finished mapping the hundreds of kilometres of sea-bottom between the ship’s present location, just off the Seagre Islands, out to the deep Lamarck Trench, it was all Vrell could do to not interfere with that blank’s plotting of an optimum course towards the trench. The navigator had already been programmed to find a route that continued as deep as possible, but high enough above major accumulations of silt so as not to disturb them unnecessarily. And when the pilot started the four big underwater turbines, Vrell let out a bubbling yelp before remembering this was all according to plan.

Via a probe floating outside, the Prador watched the ship, seen on one of the hexagonal screens before him, rise off the bottom in an explosion of silt and glittering shell. As it began sliding out towards the deeps, he observed huge funnel-headed worms exposed from underneath the hull, now retreating into their burrows. Stress readings located for him weaknesses he had earlier missed, but none of them were critical. The damage inside, mainly caused by power surges and blown generators, was not structural. In a perfect world he would have preferred to use the five gravmotors he had repaired, even though they did not function quite so well with such a mass of water above them. But that level of AG usage would immediately attract the Warden’s attention.

Bringing the probe on after the ship, Vrell felt some relief when he saw the massive vessel plane out over an underwater cliff and begin to descend. Most of the detritus on the hull had been washed away now, so the trail was not so obvious. Vrell just hoped the disturbance already caused would go unnoticed, as the currents swiftly dispersed it.

Like a great marine city fashioned vaguely about the shape of a Prador’s carapace (though not Vrell’s own, now), the ship descended. Vrell returned the probe to its port and settled back to eye the other screens giving him outside views. There were not many seagoing leviathans nearby, they having quickly sensed something larger moving in the water. The seabed was now a wide flat plain scattered with broken shell, black bones and the occasional forest of kelp trees rising hundreds of metres tall.