‘Fuck, not again,’ said the drone. ‘Warden!’
The view tilted, levelled again. The distant object must have moved very quickly because now it was gone from view, though the underwater missiles it had sent were closing fast. Sniper then received a close-up image of a nose-cone, just before the transmissions from Twelve blinked out.
‘Warden, Prador war drone detected,’ sent Sniper, winding up his tractor drive as he turned towards the surface, then engaging his S-cav field and taking off like a rocket.
‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ the Warden sent. ‘Twelve just joined me. Now, you and Eleven get out of that trench right now, and get as far from it as you can, as quickly as you can.’
‘What—’ Sniper began, but upon receipt of another image, this time from one of the Warden’s spatial eyes, he fell silent for a moment before saying, ‘We’ll lose track of that drone.’
The coil-gun fired, the projectile only becoming visible on reaching atmosphere—an orange line stabbing down towards Spatterjay’s ocean. Spectral analysis of the trail told the Warden that it was left by a large slug of exotic metal. The Prador captain had not actually resorted to planet busters, but this was bad enough. The missile hit with no visible effect for a fraction of a second, then the ocean rose and opened around a white-hot cylinder, a disc of cloud rapidly growing above it. The cylinder collapsed as it spread out into a tsunami travelling at over a thousand kilometres per hour. The ocean-level winds would move just as fast, and blast-furnace hot. Luckily the only sentient life forms in the vicinity were Sniper and Eleven, and some tomb robbers the Warden had been keeping an eye on over the other side of the Skinner’s Island. Most of the explosion’s energy would be spent by the time it reached civilization, though some ocean-going vessels were about to be in for a rough ride. However, the worst damage would be precisely where intended, in the oceanic trench many kilometres below the surface.
‘Prador vessel, cease firing on the planet forthwith!’ the Warden sent.
The coil-gun was charging again. The Prador clearly intended to work along the entire length of the trench to drive Vrell out from hiding. If it did that, the effects would certainly be felt all the way around the planet. Tens of thousands would die, environmental damage would be vast, but that would only be the beginning. The resultant volcanic activity in the trench would drive whole trench-dwelling species into extinction and cause climatic changes around the planet. The Warden could not allow this, and preventing such a catastrophe was totally within its remit.
Immediately, the Warden completely shut down the runcible, even though there were still many travellers ready to leave. The AI briefly observed someone stepping into the Skaidon meniscus extending between the device’s bull horns, then stepping out the other side and looking utterly bewildered to find himself still on Coram as the meniscus dissolved. The Coram runcible buffers were galactic upside, which meant that for travel more energy came into the runcible here than went out. The Warden had to periodically arrange pure energy transmissions to a runcible out on one of the many cold worlds that were still being terraformed, where it could be usefully employed. But it had not done that in some time, and now found a use for the surplus.
‘Cease firing on the planet, or I will be forced to take action,’ the Warden sent.
‘And what action might that be?’ the Prador captain sent back.
The AI’s bluff was being called. It realized that in this situation neither rail-guns nor other missile launchers would act fast enough, as the coil-gun was launching near-C kinetic missiles. Only light itself would do. The Warden selected one heavy laser that stood furthest away from the moon base. The weapon, even though it was the biggest, was woefully underpowered for the demand about to be made on it, but would have to do.
The super-conducting ground cables would be able to take the load, and the device itself would smoothly turn that energy into a beam until it vaporized about two seconds later. The advantage here was that it would continue to lase even as it fell apart, even up to the point of the cylinders—containing the lasing gas—melting. The Warden chose a target area and prepared one buffer to dump its energy load in a cable he was now isolating to the laser. It was ready, but how would the Prador react? It would think the AI had used the only suitable weapon available to it, overloading and destroying that weapon in the process. The art, the Warden well knew, came in what was said rather than done.
‘I have no wish to cause an incident,’ said the Warden, ‘nor have I any wish for you to cause the same.’
‘This is not a Polity world,’ the Prador replied, ‘and your ground base is in no danger.’
‘Spatterjay is a protectorate—’
The coil-gun fired again and, an instant after, so did the laser. The paths of the beam and the slug of exotic metal intercepted in the upper atmosphere. A spectacular explosion ensued, violet-shifted fire licking down into the stratosphere while a disc of rainbow incandescence spread in the ionosphere. The Warden observed the laser turret vaporizing down the S-con cable, and a plume of glowing gas extending out from the moon. Now the Warden fed the remaining energy contained in the buffers into the runcible, transmitting it to one of those distant cold worlds. It knew the Prador captain would read that a large amount of energy was being transferred somewhere, but no more than that.
‘You destroyed one of your weapons,’ the Prador said.
‘Obviously I was bluffing,’ said the Warden. ‘I possess only one level of conventional weaponry here, as you have seen. Please do not force me to resort to U-space or gravtech devices, or anything runcible-based. The result would be… regrettable.’
Of course the newer Polity battleships did carry such weapons: USERs and DUSERs being respectively general underspace interference emitters, and the directed kind which could cause a U-space drive to detonate; the various DIGRAWs—directed gravity weapons—which if they did not instantly shred their target, would occlude any antimatter vessels that same target contained with the same result, besides other devices bearing numerous other acronyms. AIs were reluctant to employ them in battle, as the difference between what the Warden labelled conventional weapons and those devices was the difference between a machine gun and an ICBM. However, the Prador must have some knowledge of them, since bad news like that is not easily concealed.
After a long delay the Prador captain asked, ‘What do you suggest?’
Still accelerating away, Sniper saw first the underwater flash, then what looked like a fast-moving and immense aquarium glass hurrying to catch him up. He withdrew his tentacles and head, and closed and sealed his composite clypeus. The pressure wave hit him, travelling at Mach 3. His cavitating field went out, and the drive sputtered to a stop shortly after. Those senses of his relying on sound were soon providing no useful information at all, and his other senses could probe no distance into the grey chaos. But in a U-space transmission he picked up Eleven’s brief ‘Oh shit’ as that submind—at the moment of its fish-shell destruction—transmitted itself to the Warden. Sniper was unsurprised: Eleven’s shell had not been as rugged as his own, and he himself was getting a battering.
Sniper’s structure distorted and components broken inside him. He noted high-pressure water forcing its way inside him through a breach in the tractor drive and tried closing its ports, but it was like trying to shut them on stone. Then the pressure wave passed on. He flipped down his clypeus, extruded his head and tentacles, and saw he was tumbling through hot clear water above a stratum of silty chaos. Activating his tractor drive and stabilizing himself with his tentacles, he watched the silt boil to a halt in its direction of flow, and all sorts of strange objects begin to float up out of it. There the carapace of a large prill, devoid of legs and bubbling hot internal gases, and there the separate carapace segments of glisters, red as cooked lobsters, and the strandy glutinous masses that were all that remained of leeches. Then something dropped past him from above and it took him a moment to identify the completely intact skeleton of a heirodont, boiled clean of flesh.