‘How did you bring down Ebulan’s ship?’ the Prador asked.

‘How long have you been waiting outside this system?’ the Warden countered.

There came no reply, nor for another six hours. After that time the Prador ship again activated side thrusters, this time to divert its course behind Coram and down towards Spatterjay. The Warden’s patience then ran out.

‘Vrost, since you have seen fit to cease communicating, I can do no less in response than activate my lowest level defensive/offensive capability.’

The Warden activated the moon base’s defensive system, and observed weapons turrets breaking up through Coram’s icy sulphurous crust all around. They rose like giant tube-worms into vacuum, folding armoured plates away from the business ends of near-C rail-guns, antiphoton cannons and particle-beam projectors. Racks of smart missiles folded up into view like collections of pan pipes. This was not the AI’s ‘lowest level defensive/offensive capability’, but all it possessed. It was also something the citizens in the base could not avoid witnessing through the chainglass panoramic windows. Queries started coming in through personal comps and augs. The Warden put up a bulletin:

BUFFER TECHNICAL FAULT DUE TO MICRO-METEORITE PUNCTURES. FURTHER METEORITE ACTIVITY IMMINENT. RUNCIBLE IS NOW OPEN PORT TO ALL SYSTEMS.

Of course, the Warden had been here before.

FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE AND SAFETY, ALL CITIZENS PLEASE PROCEED TO THE RUNCIBLE GATE.

The runcible was soon throwing people away from the moon just as fast as possible, to be caught by whichever runcibles were available to catch them. Some of those travellers might find themselves hundreds of light years away. There was no real panic, but then many Polity citizens had never faced a physical threat at any time in their lives. For most of them this seemed an enjoyable bit of excitement. Fielding a growing number of queries, the Warden noticed a small percentage of people who were clearly dubious about the board messages.

‘You lying fuck, Warden,’ said a three-hundred-year-old woman as she hurried towards the runcible. Checking her ident package and cross-referencing it to traveller lists stored from ten years ago, the AI ascertained that, like the rest of the doubters, she had been here the last time this happened, too.

‘Lock down and full defences,’ the Warden told the submind running the planetary base.

‘Ah, it’s getting nasty, then.’

‘Not yet, but it would be best to be prudent.’

Just then the Prador captain communicated.

‘None of your present weapons are capable of bringing down a Prador light destroyer, such as Ebulan’s, let alone my ship,’ it observed.

‘I am glad you have decided to continue our communication. I would not want to proceed to defence level seven, nor six.’

‘I have scanned the moon on which you are situated. You possess no further armament.’

‘Ever heard of chameleonware?’

An encoded message came through from a different source. ‘Ooh, what porky pies you’ve been telling.’

‘Shut up, Seven,’ said the Warden, observing that the turbot drone was now moonlighting by carrying passengers’ luggage to the runcible.

This time the reply from the Prador captain took an hour to arrive, while its ship went into orbit around Spatterjay. The radioactive cloud surrounding the vessel was dispersing now, but still isotopes coating its exotic metal surface concealed much. Some areas were also very well shielded. However, the Warden now had a clear and detailed exterior view, and could see huge blockish shapes shifting position on the warship’s hull. This time the communication began with a map, sans ocean, of Spatterjay’s surface, the Lamarck Trench being indicated by Prador positional glyphs.

The warship captain asked, ‘Is this sub-oceanic feature the Lamarck Trench?’

The Warden considered denial, but only momentarily.

‘It is.’

Shapes began launching from the warship and spreading out through space. Some of them were war drones, others were Prador in that heavy armour, hundreds of them. Then out of the ship’s hull folded one of those titanic blockish structures, and the Warden picked up energy signatures it knew indicated the charging of a massive coil-gun.

‘Your actions would indicate,’ suggested the Warden, ‘that Vrell is not to be welcomed back into the Prador Third Kingdom?’

Detecting a slight rise in background residual radiation, Sniper suppressed a surge of excitement. There were deposits of pitchblende on the bottom of the ocean, and the briefly radioactive current could have picked up some of that anywhere. Scanning into ultraviolet, he watched a scarf of blue water dissipating behind him. There were similar blue areas in a chaotic boulder-field where part of the cliff had collapsed. He rose higher to get a wider view over the field, then descended at an angle towards the largest area of blue. It seemed to be seeping from some kind of cavern. Sniper hesitated at the entrance. Certainly no Prador vessel was concealed in there, but perhaps here was some clue.

As he made the decision to enter, a black glister surged out with its claws spread threateningly. Upon observing him, it began frantically sculling itself to one side. It held something in its mandibles—something that glowed into the ultraviolet. Sniper stabbed out a tentacle and slapped hard behind the creature’s head, and in a cloud of blue the glister released its prize, but clamped a claw on the offending tentacle. Sniper flicked the glister, tumbling, away and turned his attention to picking up what it had dropped. At first it was only identifiable as a lump of flesh and gristle clinging to a bone, but Sniper needed no new programs to quickly recognize the bone as a human tibia. He dropped the remnant just as the glister attacked again, this time closing both its claws together on one of his tentacles. He reached out with two more and tore the creature in half, before finally entering the cave.

Ultraviolet revealed killing levels of radiation as a luminescent blue fog that obscured all view in that part of the spectrum. Infrared revealed seven glisters fighting over something. Two of them turned towards him, and he hit them both with his dissuader. Broiled bright red, they sank to the bottom. Only then taking some notice of the Warden’s instructions concerning the local fauna, he slid around behind the feeding creatures and tried to drive them out of the cave. They would not be driven, he being of a size that perhaps this pod of glisters thought they could handle. He tried ultrasound, infrasound, just simply pushing them with his tentacles, then, his patience at an end, he hit them all in turn with high-power ultrasound pulses. When, internally shattered, they all sank to the bottom, he closed in and pulled their twitching hard-shelled bodies away from the prey.

There was little left: just disjointed bones, torn flesh and skin, and some rags of clothing. The skull of this crewman, who must have come from the Vignette, had been crushed, and the brains sucked out. A spider thrall lay nearby. Sniper scanned it, but it was offline, emitting no carrier signal, so there was nothing for him to track. He backed out of the cave and sent a description of his finds to Eleven and Twelve.

‘So we’re close, then,’ replied Twelve.

‘Certainly hot,’ Eleven quipped.

‘Possibly,’ said Sniper. ‘We don’t know how far this corpse was carried by the current or by those fighting for a mouthful of it, and it might also have been dumped from Vrell’s ship while it was in transit. Make sure you scan for radioactivity.’

‘I have been,’ said Twelve. ‘I’m coming up out of the end of my particular tributary, and I’ve detected something about a kilometre out from me.’

‘Send it,’ said Sniper, then viewed the distant blob, blued by ultraviolet and rendered unrecognizable by distance. Now Twelve was sending a narrow-beam sonar image, slowly building. Sniper guessed what he was seeing, just by the size and general spherical shape. His guess was confirmed when things began detaching from the distant object and heading towards Twelve.