‘I haven’t the time,’ he muttered.

‘What was that?’ asked Twelve distantly.

‘Lively down here,’ Sniper sent.

‘Yeah, we’ve seen,’ replied the other drone.

Sniper returned to the main trench, ruminated for a little while as he searched it, then came to a decision. Abruptly he programmed some missiles in his carousel, and fired them off along the trench. After a few minutes a detonation broke the night a few kilometres ahead of him, and his sound sensors nearly overloaded internal programs with data.

‘What are you doing?’ Twelve asked.

‘Call it extended sonar,’ Sniper replied.

Seeing with sound, he had just shone a very bright torch into the darkness.

‘Better,’ he opined, but he still knew this search could take him weeks.

Close to utter exhaustion, the giant whelk pulled herself ashore, discovering that her buoyancy detracted from her ability to grip the bottom. But still she refused to release her prize even though it soon became utterly covered with leeches from the shallows. Reaching the tide line, she stretched tentacles up the beach and grasped a rocky outcrop to help pull herself and the heirodont’s severed head finally out of the sea.

The massive head was now just one great writhing mass of leeches. Irritably she stripped them away, feeding one after another, like sweets, into her beak and champing them down. A strange whistling sound distracted her, and she kept searching around for its source, finally locating it as the gas issuing from the now open orifices in her shell. But she returned her attention to the leeches, soon revealing the head itself, badly pocked but still recognizable. She prodded the beast’s mandibles and they snapped at her. Its remaining angry eye blinked and glared. Groping along the beach till she found a small boulder, she heaved it up, then smashed it down on each mandible in turn, but this was still not enough. The whelk hauled herself and the head further up the beach and, using the rock outcrop as an anvil, again smashed the mandibles until there was nothing left of them. Next she turned over the head to inspect the severed neck, then began to chew on the tough flesh. It took her hours to eat away all the skull’s exterior flesh, but she left the monster eye still blinking and glaring at her.

Only after another few hours did she discover that no amount of chewing would get her through the thick skull itself. She glanced towards the sea and observed huge movement out there. The heirodont’s body still seemed fairly lively, and somehow had stayed with her despite its lack of a head. Memory again nudged her. She then finally pecked out the eye and shoved the skull further inland. It seemed the safest thing to do in the circumstances. Now replete, she moved on across the island to the beach on its other side. She settled down contemplatively, gurgling eructations regassing her shell.

Now what? she wondered.

Depression slowed Vrell’s return to his sanctum. Some of the U-space engine’s super-conducting power cables must have had their insulation damaged, for they had transmitted a massive temperature surge inside it, cracking and blowing minor components all the way through. The main components remained undamaged, as they were built to withstand forces far beyond mere heat. The casing of the line-singularity generator was intact, as were all its internal parts. The Calabi-Yau shape expansion matrices (a technology stolen from the humans) could not be damaged by heat, though they could have been collapsed into one of the smaller dimensions of the quantum foam. And the phase emitters had gone into safety mode, folding a few degrees out of phase with reality, though those systems that could bring them back were trashed. Overall, the damage was beyond anything one Prador adult, even with slaves, could repair. In normal circumstances the functional parts would have been salvaged and all the rest scrapped. Yet, as Vrell entered his sanctum, he began to think the unthinkable.

Bringing back the phase emitters would be the most taxing task, but then the repairs to their support systems could be countenanced. Perhaps if he used an expanded Calabi-Yau shape as a tool… Such shapes were, after all, six-dimensional. All he needed to do was work out the formulae controlling energy input into a matrix, so as to distort the shape into the spatial analogue holding the phase emitters. At a rate of one base-format calculation per second, using all the ship’s computing, this would take Vrell approximately four thousand years. Too slow, therefore. But aboard there was further computing capacity he could use, in the form of human minds. He turned his attention to his control units and the spider thralls they controlled. It should be possible to use those minds to increase the computing power by an order of magnitude… It was then that Vrell noticed some interference to the thrall channels, and immediately put a trace and decode program onto it.

More Prador? Here?

The program did its work with surprising speed, and Vrell studied the results. In the ocean, not very far from him in planetary terms, he had detected the code spillover from nine interlinked spider thralls. That was very strange. The readings he was getting told him they linked through only one channel back to a control unit up on the sea’s surface. This did not seem like the work of Prador, for there was no encryption in the coding, yet their technology was definitely being employed.

Nine thralls …

This meant a mind, or minds, he could use. He must take the risk.

‘Brother, retrieve this.’ He sent coordinates and the signal to trace to the drone cache. ‘If you are seen, do not return here until you have destroyed the watcher.’

‘Yes, brother mine,’ the earlier version of Vrell replied, as it motored its war drone body out into the depths.

It had been another slow day aboard the Sable Keech, but it would not be long before things started to get more interesting. Forlam, who of course was fascinated by the ship’s grisly passengers, had informed Erlin of the recent events below decks, and of the discovery of some reifs incinerated by laser carbine. So it seemed Bloc might be beginning to exercise his power. Did she feel good about the possibility of danger? She was not sure. However, whatever he might do did not negate what she felt were her responsibilities here. She looked across the lower Tank Room to where Janer was working. She had spent most of the day running diagnostic checks of the control equipment and, at her behest, he was visually checking filters and scanning for contamination in the small autodocs each tank employed. She would let him go once he seemed about ready to start shouting at her, which would bring them full circle to the end of their last relationship. But the equipment needed to be ready. And here, she thought, turning to the reif who had just stepped from the stairwell, is the reason why.

‘Just lie down on the table,’ she said, when he finally approached.

The reif, a man without visible signs of a death wound, twisted his face in what looked very like a grin. ‘I’m not here for a medical.’

Erlin felt there was something not quite right about him—but then that could just be her. She had been sane for only a little while now, and even so knew that the virus had wrought changes in her mind. Some day she must make a study of the psychological damage the change caused.

‘Then why are you here, John Styx?’ asked Janer, who had rapidly found this an excuse not to continue with his mind-numbing task.

‘Janer,’ said the reif, then looked at each of them in turn before tilting his head to stare up at the ceiling, focusing on one of the camphones attached there. Erlin did not need any further hint. She beckoned him to follow her into an area separated by partitions erected by one of the Hoopers. Here, on wide work surfaces, sophisticated equipment lay at her disposal. It was also her base and her refuge.