Janer ruminated. Something could have gone wrong, but in all his years communicating through the hivelink, Janer had never known that to happen. It was odd, just as it was odd that the two hornets had died simultaneously. They were always of different ages so as to prevent this, so the hive mind could have an unbroken view through at least one of them. Perhaps something else had occurred: some attack on the hive mind’s communication system, and on its hornets? Janer grimaced, loath to jump to conclusions, but definitely suspicious of one individual in particular. He closed the case then removed another item from his pack and studied it warily, wondering how he would know when to use it now.
The gun looked little different from a regular gas-system pulse gun. In fact it did fire pulses of ionized gas, but it was also something more. Its appearance was a façade, but would never have fooled a runcible AI, which was why Janer had come here aboard the Gurnard. The older hive mind’s agent was a Golem, so would be very difficult to stop. An APW would do the job, but only one above a certain energy level, but such weapons were usually bulky carbines or larger, and therefore difficult to conceal. This one he could conceal, however, and with it he could prevent that agent from acquiring sprine. It was a weapon for the assassination of a Golem. Unfortunately that Golem seemed likely to be Isis Wade—and Janer rather liked him.
The trench was deep here, its bottom four kilometres below the ocean’s surface, and hundreds of kilometres from where Ebulan had originally hidden this spaceship. Scanning outside with sonar and an infrasound sampler, Vrell ascertained that the cliff rearing beside the vessel was loaded with weed and drifts of silt caught on ledges, but that there seemed no dangerous faults in the underlying stone. Selecting one of the underwater turbines he revolved it until it was pointing up at the cliff, then turned it on. This only succeeded in pushing the ship harder against the bottom for a while, then the stream of water hit the cliff, and clouds of silt, weed, shell and other detritus began to boil out and avalanche down. He listened carefully to the sound of rocks, larger shells and other odd unidentifiable objects impacting against the upper hull, and was reminded of the time he had to bury himself in the ground to escape the rampaging Captain Drum. He felt a sudden anger and nearly shut off the thruster. Why should he hide? Why should he be afraid? He could tear them apart. But he got himself back under control, and only shut off the stream of water when the silt was metres deep and beginning to impinge on the function of outside scanners and cameras. When he was ready he would fight, but not until then.
Heaving himself back up onto his legs, Vrell flexed his new pair of back limbs, which had unaccountably replaced those that had, on the island, dropped away to expose his sexual organs. These new legs were still soft, and not yet long enough to reach the ground. Did this mean he was an adolescent again? He wasn’t quite sure what it meant. No matter. He would set his blanks to work, then return to studying the account concerning the virus-infected Prador.
The pilot he programmed to repair gravmotors, and the navigator he set to dealing with the various generators and transformers. He set them to replacing coils and components with those kept in storage, or manufacturing new components in the ship’s machine shop. Setting them these tasks was not too onerous, as Ebulan had stored many thrall subprograms for this very purpose. Vrell also designated the two headless blanks to assist where they could; usually just to fetch and carry and help lift heavy items. The other blank he decided he would make dispensable, and with the quadruped robots set it to work on the ship’s fusion plants. One of those was operating so needed no attention, two required realigning and restarting, others were severely damaged and radioactive. Vrell doubted this last blank would survive this to repair them all. Then, setting alarms to alert him should the blanks encounter anything their programs did not encompass, Vrell returned to the story.
The ship, a huge exotic metal destroyer, had returned to the home system, but was ordered to take up orbit around one of the furthest cold planets and there await inspection. The council of Prador leaders, who governed the Second Kingdom, had communicated with the adult Prador aboard, but remained wary.
The report they received from the ship did not tie in with what Prador spies gleaned of the action in which it had been recently involved. Two ships had been sent to drop from U-space outside a Polity system and run in at fast sublight speeds firing antimatter missiles to intersect the course of a defence planetoid. This had all gone according to plan, and the planetoid blown to glowing dust that spread in a ring around the sun. The moon’s defences had been weak, the reason for this becoming evident when the orbital sun lasers of the system’s real defensive weapons began firing. Both ships escaped. However, this returned ship’s report claimed that the lasers had managed to destroy the other ship. Either the spies or the Captain of this surviving ship had been lying.
The order to stand off and wait was disobeyed and the ship in question dropped into U-space, managing an incredibly accurate jump into the orbit of the home world. Immediately, heavy destroyers were ordered to intercept, but not managing so accurate a U-space jump, arrived thousands of kilometres away from the planet. They also could not fire on the ship for fear of causing damage to the groundside population.
Planetary defences opened up and the ship took a terrible battering as it descended into the sea fifty kilometres off the King’s island. The then King, an ancient Prador who had ruled the Second Kingdom unassailably by keeping his council members squabbling with each other, ordered in every available force to defend him. The sea was depth-charged continuously for a month, then a hundred of the early-style Prador drones called in, too. The battle that followed Vrell was able to observe from recordings recovered from those drones lucky to survive. He saw some weirdly shaped Prador, black as night, ascending from the deeps where few should have survived the depth-charging. He recognized many similarities in these to himself now. Many were badly shattered by drone weapons, but they did not die easily and fought back hard, destroying the King’s drones one after the other. They carried the regular Prador weapons, but also ones they had modified, advanced, made more powerful.
Eventually fifty of them gained the shore, clustering about a huge one of their own kind—the size of an adult but hollow of carapace and retaining its full complement of legs as in childhood. Its head jutting forward moved independently of its body on a corded neck. Ashore they faced a force of five thousand adolescents, including armoured drones, some on the ground and some in the air. The battle should have been brief, but it dragged on as these strange new Prador rebels employed energy defence fields and even managed to survive tactical atomic blasts. As they advanced, the King retreated with a personal guard of his own adolescents, giving also the order for the withdrawal to his other forces. But their retreat only allowed the new Prador to more quickly advance. The King finally ordered a massive CTD strike, thereby sacrificing thousands of his own fighters.
What happened next became increasingly unclear to Vrell, as it was difficult to separate truth from propaganda. The island was scoured to the bedrock—nothing remaining of the attacking Prador. The King, out at sea, was deposed by an aggressive faction of his council. All his adolescents were slaughtered, and he himself was apparently injected with a slow-working diatomic acid and floated out above the sea on his own AG so other Prador could watch him die screeching and bubbling. A new King grabbed power, called Oboron, a name unfamiliar amid the previous factional infighting of the council. And so the time of the Third Kingdom began.