‘You’ve lost me there,’ replied Huff.

Extruding his silvery eye from a metre down in gritty mud, Sniper observed the spaceship, now visible through the settling murk. It extended out of sight to his right and left, and the side of it rose like a steel cliff before him. Having got this close he wondered What next? If he could get inside, there was no problem: what he would then do involved every missile left in his weapons carousel. The problem was penetrating that armour.

Sniper listened to the sea-bottom sounds at the lower end of the aural spectrum. Somewhere below him, the seismic activity of packetworms; a kilometre back he heard the scuttling of prill and glisters returning to the area, attracted by the organic detritus; and somewhere far to his left the whooshing and snapping sounds of a turbul shoal already feeding. Also, from somewhere above, there came rhythmic crumps as if someone were walking on the spaceship’s upper hull. Now extruding one of his main spatula-ended tentacles, he activated the scanning devices it contained, modifying the emitted infrasound to mimic the other sounds around him. It took some minutes for him to clean up the return signals, in which time he also detected ultrasound and infrasound scans from the ship itself. In his mind he built up a fuller picture of what lay before him, and felt a sudden surge of excitement, though quickly curtailed.

It had to be a trap, he decided; there could be no other explanation. A major triangular port lay open in the hull—the kind that Prador disembarked from, or one for deploying large weapons. Sniper retracted his tentacle and eye, and began burrowing towards that port.

The mud here was increasingly laden with rubble and large shell fragments, so Sniper’s progress slowed. In two hours he finally reached the ship’s edge, below the port, and again extruded his eye up through the mud. It was much lighter than earlier, the sun well above the horizon and its light penetrating into the depths. For a long moment he studied a strange life form nearby. This segmented thing was long and wormish, and writhing slowly. One of its segments had detached and was inching away, and even as he watched another broke free. No record of this creature in his memory… but it was irrelevant. He again probed his tentacle into the sea, and listened. Eventually he realized he was detecting only echoes—signals of scans from the ship, bounced from ten metres behind him, probably emitted from some device above him. That meant he rested in a blind spot.

Has to be a trap, he told himself.

Sniper started his chameleonware generator, then slowly and carefully burrowed to the surface. Halfway out from the sea bottom—no reaction. Fully out—still nothing. Extending his tentacles ten metres up the ship’s side, he grabbed the port’s lower rim and hauled himself up.

Drone cache.

He scanned inside with a strong ultrasound analogue of glisters and prill fighting each other. No drones were evident, but he detected ten simple optic cameras, nailed them with ten indigo lasers and projected into them the image of what he had been seeing for the last few hours: mud. Still keeping the cameras targeted, he eased inside the cache, not yet daring to use any drives or AG. Now the complicated bit. Keeping the lasers on target, he groped around on the floor, spooning up silt with the end of one of his major tentacles. Closing its spatulate end around the mud, he injected the microscopic tubes he had used to sample the Vignette wreck’s burnt timbers, but instead of sampling, used them to draw off the water. The silt, strained to the consistency of damp earth, he then injected with a slow-setting crash-foam mix. He then moved around the cache jamming the mixture into nine camera recesses. The tenth camera, still targeted by one laser beam, he decided he must try to subvert, as he could not go around sticking mud on every lens inside the ship.

It took him only minutes to remove this last camera from its recess and tap into the optic feed behind it. Using techniques learnt longer ago than he cared to remember and a programming worm stored from the same distant period, he accessed an optic amplifier and recording module behind the wall. In the module he found a clock and set it forward, then he linked recorded images into the real-time feed. The camera would now show this cache as it had been just before Sniper entered it.

Curious, the old drone copied to himself all the stored footage and, as he reinserted the camera in the wall and moved back, began studying it. What he saw was both fascinating and worrying. The life form outside had been in here, but that was not the most fascinating thing he registered. Sniper turned and gazed at a mound of remains lying to one side of the cache. He moved over and scraped away some of the silt, picking up a large piece of charred Prador carapace, then the remains of a claw. After delving for a little longer he uncovered half of a distinct visual turret, a head—something no Prador he had ever encountered had possessed. Abruptly his plans and intentions changed. He might be somewhat irascible, but he still worked for the Polity, and that organization might be served better by something other than the demolition job he intended. Turning towards the inner lock, he began sorting through his store of both physical tools and software for the right lock-picks.

The entity within the submerged vessel opened communication with the other Prador ship far above and asked, ‘Why do you want to kill me?’

On the bank of hexagonal screens beside it, the entity observed all the safety programs come on as they restricted the communication to voice only, for Vrost had just tried to send a worm burrowing into the spaceship’s systems. This probing continued for a few minutes, until the Prador captain admitted defeat and spoke.

‘Because you are an enemy of our King,’ Vrost replied.

‘Under my father, Ebulan, I have always been a loyal subject of Oboron. Now my father is dead, why am I considered a threat?’

A long delay followed. This communication was open channel so that the Warden could listen in. The entity knew Vrost could not openly say why Vrell might be considered a threat without revealing what he himself was. The entity, itself called Vrell, had therefore decided to have at least a little fun before dying.

‘All Prador adults are a threat, and only a greater threat keeps them in check,’ Vrost replied.

‘You mean Oboron, and his family, like yourself and the rest of the King’s Guard?’

This was perhaps edging into dangerous territory, but this Vrell could not resist.

‘It is by the rule of force and selection by power that the Kingdom survives. No Prador can remain unaligned.’

Vrell reflected on how Prador families that grew too powerful or made too many alliances were mercilessly crushed. In the Kingdom murder was a political tool. He now understood certain events that had meant nothing to him in the past: how many Prador families or individuals involved in biological research had been exterminated. Obviously they too had stumbled upon what he now knew.

‘Let me align myself now. Let me swear loyalty to the King. You will then have no reason to kill me.’

‘That seems reasonable,’ interjected the Warden on the same frequency.

Vrost rebuked the AI: ‘This is an internal Prador matter.’

‘Yes, but one that has spilled over into the Polity domain,’ the Warden countered.

Vrost had to be foaming at the mandibles by now. On a nearby screen Vrell observed an insistent signal from Vrost that they switch to a private channel. Doubtless the Prador captain wanted a one-to-one chat, and also to actually see Vrell—not because the bandwidth of a visual signal would allow a worm to be sent, but to confirm the truth of its suppositions one way or the other. That was not going to happen. And anyway Vrost would learn nothing by seeing this Vrell—who decided to play this game for a little longer before making the concession he had to make.