‘This was the stateroom assigned to Aesop,’ he said, ‘though he never uses it. Such luxury is wasted on the dead.’

‘Someone coming up!’ came a shout from the Hooper watching the stairwell.

Styx nodded briefly, led the way out of the room and along to the other stairwell, then down.

Travelling under the ocean at what would be Mach 1 if airborne, Sniper followed the silt trail for a hundred kilometres before it faded into the normal background micro-debris of the ocean. Shutting off his S-cav drive, he coasted for a time while assessing collected data. Obviously the ocean currents would have shifted the trail, but how far? The war drone overlaid the present silt trail on his internal map of the sea bottom. Then, taking into account the ocean currents and tides, he tracked this trail’s position back day by day. The twisting line deformed, grew wider to account for possible error, but still—at a point in time a few days after the disappearance of the Vignette—it seemed to match some seabed features. Sniper turned, opened up with his drive, and returned with all speed to the spot where the spaceship had originally rested.

‘What you doing?’ asked Twelve from above.

‘The silt trail is just about gone, but I’ve plotted its original location. I’ll follow it and see if I can get into our friend’s thinking.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Twelve, with more than a hint of boredom.

Propelled by his tractor drive, without the S-cav field engaged, Sniper followed the winding trail he had configured along the ocean’s bottom. After fifty kilometres of this and two dead leeches, he still could not plumb the Prador’s thinking. Apparently it was heading towards the Lamarck Trench, but then it would have needed to circle back round the Skinner’s Island to go anywhere else. Then Sniper picked up a sudden surge from his magnetometer as he detected something far off to one side. He turned to trace the source, travelling two kilometres away from his current course. Finding only a piece of Ebulan’s ship which, judging by its encrustations, must have fallen away prior to it crashing ten years ago, he cursed repeatedly as he returned. It was only as he motored back through his own silt trail that he realized the Prador had made a compromise between depth and silt disturbance along the most direct route leading to the trench. It had clearly never expected any of this trail to last long enough to be followed.

‘He’s definitely gone to ground in the trench,’ Sniper sent.

‘That’s good,’ sighed Twelve.

‘What are your intentions?’ the Warden interrupted.

‘Well, this trail will only show me where he entered the trench, not where he is positioned now. Reaching it, he could have turned either left or right, or even into one of the tributaries. My chances of finding him are the same from wherever I begin my search. What can you give me?’

‘The geosurvey drones would not be able to sustain the pressure, and Thirteen is presently otherwise occupied. You will have to make do with Eleven and Twelve.’

‘You don’t seem that anxious to find this bastard—and its bastard drone.’

‘This bastard probably just wants to leave the planet, and though the loss of the Vignette crew is lamentable, it does not warrant major intervention on my part. Anyway, this may soon no longer be our concern.’

‘What?’ Sniper asked, then grunted almost physically as he began to decode the information package the Warden sent. ‘I see,’ the drone muttered. ‘We just got shat on all the way from Earth.’

Janer studied the still-shifting remains of the hooder and wondered who was now in charge of the Sable Keech. About ten Kladites were now little more than piles of bones and reification hardware. The Hoopers waiting all around him were now well armed.

‘Steady, boys,’ said Ron, standing up at the sound of marching across the deck above.

The thirty or so Hoopers down here looked steady enough to Janer.

The Kladites started descending the two nearby ladders. A group of about twenty gradually gathered at the base of each, then milled around confusedly when they saw what awaited them.

‘Shall we do ‘em?’ asked Forlam eagerly. It seemed he was anxious to try out his new toy.

‘No,’ said Ron, ‘we’ll just make sure our position is clear, then get on with the work we’re being paid for.’

Taylor Bloc, carefully checking his hand- and footholds, finally worked his way down the ladder.

‘Looks a little shaky,’ opined Wade.

The Kladites parted to allow their leader through, then fell into ranks behind him. A few metres from Ron, the reif halted. He turned to stare at the remains of the hooder.

‘How was it killed?’ Bloc asked.

‘Well,’ said Ron, ‘I reckon whoever originally hit it with the APW came and finished the job this time. Never saw what happened myself. I was waiting for Forlam to bring us these weapons.’

‘I see,’ said Bloc, eyeing the gathered Hoopers, only a few of whom did not carry some of the hardware Forlam and Styx had obtained from Aesop’s stateroom. ‘Does anyone know who owns this APW?’

A general shaking and scratching of heads was all the reply he received.

‘So it would seem the present crisis is over.’ Bloc glanced back at his own men, then around at the Hoopers. To Janer it seemed the reif was weighing the odds. Laser carbines against Hoopers armed with Batian weapons: it seemed that Bloc did not rate his chances very high. ‘I don’t want any further trouble. We have already had… sufficient.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ said Ron pleasantly. ‘We’ve got work to do now if this ship is not to founder,’ Ron looked beyond Bloc to his gathered Kladites, ‘and more trouble would just mean more mess for us to clean up.’

Bloc did not turn or say anything out loud, but his people began heading back towards the ladders. After a moment he followed them. Forlam and many of the other Hoopers appeared slightly disappointed by this retreat.

‘I would dearly love to pull his head off,’ muttered Ron.

Stepping out of the shadows behind, John Styx said, ‘I understand your feelings, Captain Ron, but his attempt to prevent you obtaining weapons that would have proved ineffective against this creature hardly seems sufficient justification.’

‘Yes, I guess so.’

Styx held up a battered spray can and inspected it. ‘Patience—I think we will know soon enough,’ he said.

Ron sighed. ‘Okay, let’s go to work then.’

Just two ships were in sight: one moored to a clump of sargassum, the other heeled over and heading away. Ambel recognized the moored ship as the Moby (which it was generally called rather than by its recorded name of Moby’s Dick) at just the same time as he recognized the figure on her bridge staring back at him through binoculars. After the loss of his ship Ahab the other Captains had pooled their resources to buy Captain Drum another vessel, for in sinking his own ship, which contained a Prador CTD, Drum had saved all their lives. Many said that Drum, who had been implanted with a spider thrall that he ejected from his body before sinking his vessel, was now slightly mad and dangerous to know. Ambel, who had lived through experiences more nightmarish even than that, thought this criticism unfair, for in reality it was a description that applied to all Hoopers. ‘Take her in. We’ll anchor just off the Moby and pay a visit,’ he told Boris.

Boris eyed him. ‘What about our friend?’ The helmsman still did not quite believe Ambel’s story about a Whelkus titanicus attacking a heirodont. But then a whelk managing to pursue a ship as far as it had was an unlikely story in itself.

‘We’ve seen no sign of it, and the turbul and boxies have been behaving normally. I reckon if it survived the heirodont, it probably lost our trail.’