‘Well, if it’s fucking war they want,’ he sent.
‘It is not war,’ the Warden replied. ‘But it seems they very much don’t want Vrell leaving here alive.’
‘Seems a bit drastic just for one post-adolescent Prador,’ Sniper opined.
‘Yes, it does—and that’s interesting.’
Sniper began motoring towards the surface. ‘Did they hit him?’
‘Not as far as I can gather.’
Sniper broke through the surface into a hurricane raging below the weirdest sky he had seen in a long time. A low ceiling of grey cloud stretched from horizon to horizon, but wherever it broke he observed the rainbow aurora of high-atmosphere ionization.
The Warden continued, ‘That was in the nature of a little nudge to drive him from cover. At present no further such nudges will be forthcoming, so I suggest you find Ebulan’s ship before our friend up here gets impatient again.’
Sniper located himself on his internal map by signals from one of the Warden’s satellites, and realized the pressure wave had carried him eighty kilometres.
‘Okay, send me a copy of Twelve’s last ten minutes. That drone he detected was probably heading straight back to Vrell.’
The package arrived within a second, but it took a minute for Sniper to delete everything irrelevant: including the drone’s boredom with the task in hand, a program it was running concerning the historical significance of seashells, and how it really didn’t want to get splattered when so close to buying emancipation. The residue fined down to Twelve’s exact position when it had detected the Prador drone, that drone’s then position, and its general course before it spotted Twelve. Sniper aligned that same course on his internal map, and saw that continuing it in a straight line brought it to a point on the Lamarck Trench five hundred kilometres from where he was. He tried to start his supercavitating field, but it was then that a swarm of error messages called attention to themselves.
‘Fuckit, fuckit, fuckit!’ Sniper repeated as, on tractor drive only, he headed slowly to that identified location, while shifting internal micro-welding heads to repair the breaches in the S-cav field generator.
As fast as possible, Vrell put his blanks on hold, clinging to the nearest supports and holding onto any breakable items. He shut down all internal systems that could be disrupted by a shock, isolated fusion reactors, and closed all the workable internal doors. The drone made it back inside just in time, and Vrell rapidly closed the cache door behind it. Then he himself clattered over to one side and clung to the uneven wall of the sanctum. The underwater blast wave slammed into the ship, lifting it up off the bottom so the concealing layer covering its upper hull slid away, and grinding it down nose first a few hundred metres along the bottom of the trench. Then the ship settled in a roiling cloud of silt. Debris falling through the water—boiled and broken creatures, boulders torn free from above and the silt itself—would soon conceal him again. But perhaps the time for concealment of that kind had ended.
Vrell absorbed the download from his drone. It had been spotted by one of the Warden’s drones, but had destroyed that observer just before the blast. But the Warden would now know this ship was close, and so might detect it at any moment. Vrell listened again to the transmissions he had decoded between the Warden and the Prador warship. If Vrell’s ship was detected down here, how long before the Prador captain fired a kinetic missile directly on target? Admittedly the captain had not yet recognized the Warden’s double bluff, for it was fabricated upon the way this very ship had first been brought down. Vrell knew this had been effected by subversion of thrall codes, distracting Ebulan sufficiently for that old war drone to slam both itself and a dead Prador drone down on top of the ship from high atmosphere, with an impact not dissimilar to that of the recently fired kinetic missile. No U-space or gravtech weapons had been deployed—the Warden possessed none. However, Vrell thought it likely that the Prador captain had actually ceased firing because he did not want to cause an incident, and the fifty or so kinetic missiles he might need to work along the entire length of the trench would certainly do that. Just one missile though…
Vrell then considered why the captain had fired at all. Obviously the Prador King knew what the Spatterjay virus could turn other Prador into, and suspected that Vrell, having survived so long on this planet, might also be infected. The King certainly did not want that kind of competition, nor for anyone but himself and his immediate offspring to enjoy the same advantage.
‘What do I do with this?’ asked the drone from down in its cache.
Vrell came sharply out of his reverie, to look through his brother’s eyes, and through those others’ eyes down below. The drone was holding part of a segmented life form in its claws. Though one end of it was ragged, as if part of it had been torn away, it was still writhing furiously. Vrell picked up the uncoded thrall carrier signals issuing from it and, as he magnetometer-scanned it, realized there was a spider thrall lodged in each of its segments. It was then easy for him to read the carrier signal and program it into the control unit previously employed to run the radioactive blank ejected earlier. This certainly could be no setup instituted by Prador, for they were utterly aware of the interchangeability of control unit and thrall. For if you did not sufficiently encrypt signals to and from a thrall, an enemy might use it to control you instead. This had happened regularly in the Third Kingdom and, adult Prador being even less friendly to each other than to different species, the result was usually extremely painful, messy, and then terminal.
Vrell linked through with ease, quickly decoded the programs employed, and usurped the partitioned control unit at the other end. He then gazed, through human eyes, out across the ocean, discovering that Taylor Bloc’s mind was a morass of contradictory conviction and frustration. The three partitions were designed for three control channels: one each for two human minds and one for what remained of the creature his drone had retrieved. But the whole system had become scrambled by the feedback caused by the creature’s massive injury. The two human minds were currently offline, somnolent. Perfect, for here then was more processing space for the U-space formulae. Keeping Taylor Bloc unaware, Vrell routed through programming links to those two minds he had controlled, and immediately began using them to run formulae, then he returned his attention to the reif himself.
Only touching Bloc’s mind lightly, Vrell replayed fragments of his recent memory. In these he observed the launching of the Sable Keech and the subsequent embarkation of Polity citizens. Replaying more recent events he was amused by the thoroughly human drama unfolding. By the signal strength from the control unit he had just usurped, he realized the huge sailing ship itself was close.
Interesting, thought Vrell.
Standing on the top of the midship deckhouse, Janer raised his image intensifier to his eyes and studied the distant volcanic island. It was nameless, that place, so on the map called up on his cabin screen bore only a number. Commenting on this island to Erlin, who at that moment was hoisting yet another reif into yet another tank—over twenty of them had gone into the tanks now—she had replied, ‘Flowers in the sea there—a kind of sea lily you find out this way—that’s about all I remember, because I was losing it by then.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I saw it as Zephyr carried me over.’
‘I see.’
Janer moved on then, recognizing impatience in her voice. Zephyr, he thought. There was some connection between that one and Isis Wade, for Wade had been spending a lot of time conversing with the Golem sail up in the rigging. Perhaps it would all come out when Wade made his promised explanation.