Returning inside, Janer observed the small group of Kladites now sitting around a table—probably positioned there to note down the identities of those who were breaking the curfew Bloc had tried to impose. No one had been punished as yet, so perhaps Bloc was wary of upsetting the uneasy truce for the moment. Like the other reifs scattered around the room, the Kladites sipped through straws pure ethanol drinks to complement the balm inside them. He had seen Sable Keech do the same, ten years ago, and wondered if they too possessed the facility to feel or emulate inebriation. He walked past that table and went over to stand with Erlin, Ron and Wade.

‘I just saw a rhinoworm with legs,’ he commented.

Erlin turned to him. ‘The juvenile form. They grow up in island nurseries, like this one surrounding us, and lose their legs as they go fully pelagic.’

‘They’re going to give us trouble,’ Janer stated.

‘They don’t mind snacking on each other,’ said Ron. ‘Our problem is that every time those autolasers hit one, its remains attract even more.’

‘Will there be many of them here?’ Janer asked.

Erlin replied, ‘The adults gather in places like this en masse, and each one lays tens of thousands of eggs under the leaves or on the stalks of those plants you see out there. There’s probably millions of juvenile rhinoworms around this island.’

‘There’s always the thought to consider that we might be better off somewhere ashore,’ Janer said, passing his glass back to the barman—the metalskin android was fashioned in blued metal with a flattened ovoid head and scanning red eyes. It looked like a prill mounted on the neck of a humanoid body.

‘You did notice that they’ve got legs?’ said Erlin dryly.

‘Yeah, but I wasn’t thinking about that. What if that Prador captain above us decides to ignore the Warden and continue its bombardment?’ The Warden had lately updated them on recent events. ‘How many more of those waves can this ship endure?’

‘And where would we go, once we’re ashore?’ asked Ron.

Janer thought about that for a moment: the devastation visible over the island, the steam rising from the caldera somewhere behind the highest point on the island.

‘Okay, dumb idea, I guess,’ he allowed.

Janer now considered revealing to Erlin and Ron what he had learnt from Wade—he trusted these two absolutely and felt the Golem should do the same—but just then there came disturbing sounds from outside, as of all the lasers firing at once.

‘Ah, that’s it.’ Ron took out his comlink and strode to the door. Janer, Erlin and Wade followed the Captain, and this caused a general exodus from the bar. The racket originated from the sea below, so everyone moved to the rail to look over. Janer was expecting to witness some massed attack from leggy rhinoworms, but what he saw was the sea boiling towards the stern, just forward of the rudder. Large chips of wood kept bobbing to the surface amidst a spreading slick of sawdust.

‘Is that supposed to happen?’ asked Erlin. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it such a good idea to make holes in the hull.’

Wade explained for her. ‘The propellers are made of case-hardened ceramal. They’re mounted on telescopic shafts housed in watertight compartments inside the hull. When activated, they just bore their own way out through the hull. A concealed engine Windcheater could make no objection to, but evident propellers would be a little too much.’

‘How did you know all this?’ Erlin gazed at Ron, Wade and Janer in turn.

Janer shrugged. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Styx broke into the ship’s concealed plan a while ago,’ said Ron. ‘It’s just the control codes we’ve been after, since.’

‘And this will pull us free?’ Erlin glanced back at the boiling sea.

‘If we don’t run out of power first,’ replied Ron, watching the lasers turn more of the walking rhinoworms into macaroni.

The trench was now right below Sniper and slowly the error messages from his S-cav drive were blinking out. He descended a cliff that sprouted seaweed trees in the branches of which shoals of boxies swam like mobile silver apples. Passing a deep cave, he observed two large eyes watching him, and an ultrasound scan rendered him the strange image of something like a giant whelk, sans shell, protecting its softer body in stone like some kind of hermit crab. Finally reaching the bottom, he scanned at full power with each of his senses, then again picked up something in ultraviolet.

Prador were riddled with tactical blind spots—it was this that had once enabled Sniper to defeat a number of Ebulan’s drones, even though they carried superior firepower and armour—and he suspected this was how he would now find the hidden spaceship. Doubtless Vrell had concealed it in a deeper part of the trench, but what the Prador had failed to conceal were the leaking radioactives, which were thick in the water here. Choosing the direction from which the current seemed to be sweeping the isotopes, he headed off. Then, ahead of him, against the base of a rocky underwater cliff, he spotted the painfully bright glare of some large pill-shaped metallic object.

Sniper scanned his find briefly, quickly realizing it was a dumped fusion reactor—its casing cracked and the isotope ash of its last faulty burn poisoning both itself and now its surroundings. Around this object the bottom was littered with dead and dying creatures: some small varieties of whelk and bleached-white heirodonts no bigger than a human arm. Checking his records the drone realized these were creatures whose vision extended into the ultraviolet. They had been attracted by the light—and it had killed them.

‘Fuckit,’ Sniper muttered, moving on.

The reactor could have been dumped during the journey along the trench, so the ship itself could be many kilometres from here. Almost with a sigh, Sniper transmitted his findings to the Warden, then continued trundling along just above the bottom.

The AI on Spatterjay’s moon responded immediately. ‘You must find that ship soon. The Prador captain is becoming impatient. His drones and his armoured Prador have dropped to the stratosphere, and I don’t think they will hold there for long.’

‘This could be a good sign,’ said Sniper. ‘If Vrell had considered the possibility of this reactor being found, he’d have concealed it better. It could be that it was only carried a minimal distance from the ship itself, and then dumped.’

He now reached the base of a rubble slope in the trench. The remaining error messages in his S-cav drive now merely concerned his jammed ports. This meant weaknesses in his armour, but did not mean the drive itself would not work.

‘That is a possibility arising from optimism rather than logic,’ opined the Warden huffily.

Sniper sent back a U-space raspberry and continued searching.

Halfway up the slope the drone spotted a small shoal of those heirodonts encountered earlier near the reactor. The water was disturbed and murky around them as they fed upon something. Admitting the possibility of finding another human corpse, though by the readings in ultraviolet not a radioactive one, Sniper motored over.

The heirodonts dispersed, then circled round again—loath to leave their meal. Revealed was an adult frog whelk, much the size of Sniper himself, its shell crushed under the edge of a large slab of rock. What remained of its extended foot still moved weakly, but its eyes were gone and what he could see of its main body, inside the broken shell, was in tatters. Even while he watched, more of those same heirodonts fled from cracks in the whelk’s shell. The creatures would not have been able to feed on the whelk in any other circumstance. He suspected that having most of its main body eaten had weakened it sufficiently for them to go to work on its tough appendage.

But there was nothing else important for him here.