‘You’d bet on that, Captain?’ Boris asked.

Ambel patted him on the shoulder. ‘We can’t live our lives expecting that thing to turn up all the time, lad.’

Boris nodded and spun the helm. The Treader heeled over and after a while Galegrabber furled himself along with fabric sails. Just ahead of them a mass of sargassum floated on the ocean: rotting woody stalks and wadded ribbons of weed. A couple of hammer whelks occupied it, but nothing else. Any prill there had no doubt been disposed of by Drum’s crew, for the Moby was moored to this mass. Ambel climbed down to the deck and walked over to the bows. There he took up a heavy iron grapnel attached to a long coil of thick greased rope. The ocean was too deep here for bottom anchors, and this was the only way. He spun the grapnel over his head and released it. It arced out, trailing rope, to thud into the weed just by the hammer whelks, sending those creatures lolloping into the sea. Then, drawing in the slack as the Treader nosed into the weed itself, he checked the grapnel’s hold and tied off the rope.

‘Hey up, Drum!’ Ambel bellowed. ‘Got anything cooking?’

‘Prill!’ Drum bellowed back. ‘I got prill on the menu today!’

Ambel turned to his gathering crew. ‘We won’t be staying here too long. You two,’ he pointed at Davy-bronte and Silister standing uncertainly in the background, ‘this may be your opportunity to catch a ride back to Chel. Drum may have some more sailing to do, but he’ll certainly be going back that way before we do.’ He turned to the others. ‘Anne and Boris will also come across with me. Anne, find us a cask of seacane rum. The rest of you, get the ship’s boat lowered.’

‘Aye, Captain,’ replied Anne, moving away. Silister and Davy-bronte, with the help of Pillow and another junior, set about lowering the ship’s boat, while Ambel turned his attention to Peck.

‘You’re in charge, Peck. I know you’re feeling a tad nervous,’ Ambel eyed the shotgun Peck was clutching, ‘so it’s best you stay here and keep an eye on things.’

Peck did just that, watching with unnerving intensity as the five scrambled down into the boat and rowed across to the Moby.

Like most Old Captains, Drum was built like a tank, but unlike many he had retained his hair, which he tied back into a pony tail. He was a wide-faced individual who always had a welcoming grin for his friends. He wore it now, but there was something unnerving about it.

‘How you doing, man?’ Ambel said, shaking Drum’s hand and looking round.

Drum’s crew was a relatively new one, as his previous crew had all been murdered by Batian mercenaries and the adolescent Prador, Vrell. Some of them, Ambel noticed, were from Ron’s old ship. There stood the appropriately named Roach, a raggedy weasel of a man who was honest because no one gave him any other choice, because he looked more untrustworthy than he actually was. Others were gathered around a couple of braziers on which prill roasted. Some of them were already eating: holding prill upside down on their laps with belly plates hinged open, scooping out the fragrant contents with spoons. Many of them, Ambel also noted, bore healing prill wounds.

‘They can be a bugger to catch intact,’ Ambel observed.

‘All you need is a little perseverance,’ said Drum, rubbing his hands together. ‘What’s that there, then?’ He nodded to the cask Anne was carrying on her shoulder.

‘A little gift,’ said Ron.

‘Then best we get it open! I’d guess you don’t want to hang around too long.’

Ambel raised an eyebrow. ‘Captain Sprage?’

‘Oh yes, we all know about your rescue mission.’

‘Do you know these two lads?’ Ambel gestured to the two Vignette crewmen.

Drum eyed the two men while scratching contemplatively at the back of his neck—a habit he seemed unable to break ever since digging a spider thrall out of there. ‘I know their faces…’ Then his attention wandered to where Anne and one of his own crewmen were driving a tap into the rum barrel. Suddenly realizing what he was doing with his hand, he snatched it away to rest on a nearby rail.

‘These are all that’s left of the Vignette crew.’ Ambel kept a close eye on the other Captain as he explained the next bit. ‘Seems the rest of the crew was grabbed by a Prador war drone before it sank their ship.’

‘Really?’ Drum turned back to look at Ambel. His apparently calm demeanour was belied by a loud crack as his hand splintered the rail. Most Old Captains’ horror of what Prador had done to their human captives, and their resulting hatred of the aliens, was a pale reflection of Drum’s views on them.

‘Seems,’ said Ambel, ‘that Prador you were hunting on the Skinner’s Island might have survived. The Warden didn’t say so, but no others have come here.’

Drum released the rail, now reduced to half its original thickness. ‘I think I’ll be needing a drink.’

So they drank, and Ambel related recent events. Whether Drum believed what he was told about the whelk and the heirodont (a name for a fable if ever there was one), Ambel couldn’t tell. Drum obviously had other things on his mind, murder probably being one of them. Later, Silister and Davy-bronte together approached Ambel.

‘We’d like to stay with the Treader, if we may,’ said Silister.

‘Why’s that, lad?’ asked Ambel.

Davy-bronte answered. ‘He’s not there yet, nowhere near, but he could turn too, like Orbus. We don’t want to be here for that.’

‘You think so?’ Ambel asked, and they both nodded vigorously. ‘All right, let’s get ourselves back, then.’

As Ambel and his fellows made their farewells, Drum said, ‘Looks like a storm’s about due,’ and Ambel knew he was not referring to the weather.

Drum was so very right, in more ways than he knew.

The movable deck section hinged up on hydraulic rams, and the crane ran on high-powered electric step motors, but it took Hooper muscle to heave the still-squirming remains of the hooder into the cargo net. Hovering ten metres above the deck beside the central mainmast, Thirteen watched as the crane hoisted into the sunshine what was left of the creature—writhing like some great black maggot—and swung out over the sea to drop it. The drone watched a sudden activity in the water, spotting leeches and the long writhe of a rhinoworm closing in, and wondered if the life forms of Spatterjay would be able to digest this tough alien flesh. Then, turning its attention to Taylor Bloc and the watching Kladites, Thirteen assessed the situation there.

The Hoopers could probably wipe out these Kladites very quickly, and many of them were eager to do so. However, Ron kept them on a tight rein, reminding them that they had yet to be paid, which seemed to do the trick. The Captain was biding his time, and had quietly opined to Thirteen that something stank about recent events. The particular group of reifications the hooder had attacked had been those who had been giving Bloc a hard time—also some of them had been incinerated by laser carbine. Bloc’s explanation that this had happened accidentally while the Kladites fired on the hooder was weak at best. The present situation seemed precarious to the drone, who felt sure it would not last. Thirteen moved out from the mast and headed for the open deck as Bloc and his followers returned to their bridge staterooms. From down below came the sounds of industry.

With the hooder now out of the way, the Hoopers could all continue with the task of repairing the rudder. The drone descended a couple of levels, then hovered to observe the maintenance section. Several reifications were shifting movable floor panels from where they had been stacked to one side, and slotting them back in place. Two Hoopers had disassembled a large ram, earlier disconnected from the rudder and carried up here by Captain Ron. Hydraulic fluid ran out of the ram’s incinerated seals, trickling off the bench on which it rested. Another Hooper was returning from the stores carrying a box of new seals, and yet more Hoopers were coming up from the bilge with various other components of the rudder control system which were in need of repair or replacement.