The Voyage of the Sable Keech

19

Bloc knew he could not hold it together for much longer. New error messages kept flashing up in his visual cortex every few minutes, and if he did not get himself into a tank soon, he would end up like Bones and have no body to resurrect. Also, since it was becoming evident that the Prador ship might soon be on the move, things were getting a bit tense here on the bridge.

‘If it comes straight up, we’re buggered,’ announced Captain Ron. ‘Let’s start the engines so, if we get a chance, we can pull clear.’

Bloc stared down at his right hand, which was gripping his carbine. It was shaking, and that could not be due to the putrefaction of his body but to some deeper fault. He must not let anyone off this ship—that fact was hard-wired into his mind, had become his main purpose for being—but enforcing that order was now destroying his chance at resurrection. The longer he remained here in control, the more of his body would be eaten away. But once placed in a tank he would no longer be in control, and then would they even keep him there, after all he had done? He must remain totally in control to prevent anyone leaving the ship, but he… but… but… His thoughts spun round and round in circles, and for a moment he could not even find the will to speak.

‘Bloc, let us start the engines,’ Ron repeated.

‘You will remain…’ was all Bloc could manage.

‘We’ll all end up in the sea,’ muttered Aesop.

Bloc immediately clamped down on him hard, but the effort of doing so resulted in displacement of the mess of software in his head, and he was mentally blinded by the mass of error messages scrolling up in his mind. As soon as he managed to turn them off, another flashed up:

MEMSPACE: 00018

He cleared that, and when he could finally see again, he found John Styx standing before him.

‘Look.’ Styx pointed outside.

Bloc turned his head to see one of the towering weapons turrets sinking. It was slowly being withdrawn into the Prador ship.

‘It’s preparing to leave,’ explained Styx, ‘and if it destroys our ship in the process, what then? All of us end up at the bottom of the sea, no Kladites to adore you, no power for you to exercise, no triumphant arrival at the Little Flint—your dream of the Sable Keech ended.’

Bloc felt a flash of anger. They were disrespecting him again, ignoring what he was and all he had done for them. He said to Styx, ‘You… know too much.’

‘What’s to know? That you’ve deified a man who would have nothing but contempt for you. You crave worship as much as you crave control. Let us at least try to move the ship to safety.’

‘Keech… would understand.’ Wouldn’t he? Everything was too confusing now.

Styx stepped forwards. ‘You said I know too much. Would you like to know how? I know so much because I’ve known about you for a lot of years, Taylor Bloc. I knew all about the corruption and murder you instituted while you were alive, and how you used Cult power to obtain the industrial contracts that first made you rich.’

‘Enough,’ said Bloc, still trying to find some control in his own mind.

Styx continued relentlessly, ‘I knew about your interest in Prador technology, for my interest was the same if not more than yours. I should have dealt with you back then, but I had more pressing concerns, and anyway I’d learnt that certain groups on Klader were sending friends Aesop and Bones after you, so thought that would be the last I’d hear of you. It wasn’t until recently I learnt how you had been reified and were apparently served by two individuals called Aesop and Bones. Imagine my surprise. Imagine how little time it took me to figure out what you had done.’

‘I said… enough…’

‘You know,’ said Styx, ‘I actually thought about a change of career. But while there are shits like you running around, I’ve still got a job to do.’

MEMSPACE: 00007

‘Of course I should have arrested you before you got this far, as here we are beyond Polity law, but it’s surprising the power you have to fascinate. I should have acted. I should not have allowed you to establish power over the reifications on this ship.’ He pulled from his jacket an aerosol canister of a kind Bloc immediately recognized, and held it up. ‘I should not have allowed this.’

In a puzzled voice, Ron asked, ‘What’s that, then?’

Erlin, still restrained by Bones, replied, ‘It’s a hormone from a creature that grazes on fungus, and has a smell almost irresistible to hooders.’

Ron shrugged, then stepped over to one of the consoles.

‘Stay were you are!’ Bloc shrilled.

‘I think we’ve had enough of this,’ said Ron. With casual speed he reached out with his hands, grabbed both his Kladite guards and slammed them together so hard that their balm spattered the surrounding consoles. They stayed upright for a moment, then began to sag. Ron ignored them, pressing a button and stooping over the intercom microphone. ‘Okay, Hoopers, time to come out and play. Take down these Kladite buggers.’

‘Kill him!’ Bloc screamed.

Ignoring the weapon in his own hands, Bloc sent an instruction to Aesop, who raised his carbine and fired it at Ron. The beam sliced into the Old Captain’s arm, but briefly, for Janer was there in an instant, driving a thrust kick into Aesop’s chest and slamming him back over a console and straight into one of the windows.

‘That smarts.’ Ron merely patted out his smoking limb, but when the two Kladites at the head of the stairwell started firing, he roared and charged straight across the bridge. Ignoring the holes being burnt into his body, he grabbed the two of them and slammed them together, before throwing them down amidst those trying to cram up the stairwell. Ramming the door shut on them, he spun the wheel and smashed his fist into the door’s coded locking mechanism. By now the three remaining Kladites inside the bridge had also opened up on him. He ran at them, caught them, and one after the other tossed them out the gap where a window had been knocked out by the tsunami. They were nothing to him, the burns they inflicted were nothing to him. For the first time Bloc had some true intimation of what it meant to be an Old Captain.

Ron now headed over to another console and pressed a sequence of touch-plates. A new vibration thrilled through the ship as its engines started.

‘Stop… or I kill her!’ Bloc shouted, then shook his head, blinded again by error messages. He staggered back, waved his arm in front of himself. Chaotic vision returned. Through Aesop’s eyes—Janer was pinning that reif to the floor—he saw himself waving his arm with rotten skin hanging off it in a sheet. He whimpered, fought for control, regained full vision.

‘Stop the ship or I kill Erlin!’ Bloc shouted.

‘You forget,’ said Erlin, ‘I’m a Hooper.’ She reached back, grabbed Bones and ducked down, throwing him. He landed near Ron and shot upright again. Ron backhanded him with such force he flew in a flat trajectory out of the window, after the Kladites. Erlin stood clutching a hand to her bloody throat. She spat some blood and grinned, exposing gory teeth.

The ship seemed to be tilting, then Bloc realized that no, it was turning. The Prador spaceship must have dropped down to pass under it, for to his left one of the low turrets was generating its own wake. What could he do now? The Prador had abandoned him, and now a void was opening in his consciousness. His attention swinging to Santen and Styx, he raised his carbine and fired. Santen stepped quickly in front of Styx, and staggered back gazing down at her burning chest, then up at Styx who had caught her.

‘You think… I didn’t guess,’ she said to him, smoke issuing from her mouth.

MEMSPACE: 00005

Styx lowered her to the floor, her hardware obviously damaged for she showed no further signs of moving. Bloc swung his carbine from right to left, trying to cover everyone remaining in the bridge.

‘All your dreams, Bloc’ Styx shook his head as he stood. ‘I think, before you shoot me and Ron subsequently rips your head off, I’d like to tell you more about myself and my investigations.’

‘What’s… to know?’ asked Bloc dismissively.

‘Well, I’m a policeman,’ said Styx.

‘So? There is no law out here.’

‘Yes.’ Styx carefully held up his left hand and pulled back the sleeve to expose an antique watch. So as not to get anyone too excited he slowly reached out, pressed buttons on the side of it to change the display, then pressed his thumb against that display.

What now?

Travelling out from either side of the wristband, a fizzing light spread like embers on fuse paper, across John Styx’s shrivelled skin. Behind this fire, his skin seemed to inflate, till it adopted the normal healthy texture of a living human being’s. Though Bloc recognized some very sophisticated chameleonware effect, he could not understand the why of it.

The light fizzed to the tips of Styx’s fingers and went out. It travelled up his arm and into his sleeve, lighting his clothing from inside as it spread all the way around his body. Eventually it reached his collar, travelled up his neck and over his face, revealing living human features.

Something familiar…

Bloc tried to dismiss the thought. Everyone knew that the longer you lived, the more readily your brain catalogued people by type, till everyone began to look familiar. Then it hit him so hard, the realization of who now faced him, that he lost his last shreds of control. He sank down on his knees.

‘Well bugger me,’ said Ron. ‘That policeman.’

The man stepped calmly forward, tugged the laser carbine from Bloc’s limp grasp and turned the weapon to shove it against his chest. The carbine was pointed slightly to one side, precisely at where Bloc’s crystal was located. It was all too much.

OUTPARAFUNCT: B.P. LOAD INC. 100 %

WARN: EXTREMITY PROBES NIL BALM LA71-94, LH 34–67…

WARN: ALL E-PROBES REG. VIRAL INFECT.

MEMSPACE: 00002

One after another, warning messages were now scrolling up before his inner vision and he seemed unable to shut them down. The next thing Bloc knew he was flat on his back staring through a flood of artificial tears at the roof of the bridge.

‘How does it feel to have a ship named after you?’ asked Captain Ron.

‘Well, I’m honoured of course,’ replied the man standing over Bloc.

MEMSPACE: 00000

OVERLOAD: CRYSTAL SAFETY MODE

Blackness.

The retracting weapons turret was closing the gap. Ignoring what injuries he might cause the two crewmen, Wade shoved them up through it then followed them. The spaceship was moving lower in the sea now, the blast of its turbines stirring up a great wall of silt specked with glittering shoals of boxies, whose cubic bodies seeming like pixel faults in a solid holographic display. The Sable Keech was now a few metres up, sliding over, driven by its own screws. The submersible port had to be some distance ahead of him, and there was no way he could swim to it encumbered with his present load. His APW strapped across his back, he quickly tore off his gloves, boots, then the syntheflesh coverings of his hands and feet revealing his skeletal metal fingers and toes. In his left hand he grabbed the cables binding the wrists of the two crewmen, squatted, then drove himself upwards off the Prador ship. Two metres up and the keel of the Sable Keech was speeding immediately over him. He closed his free hand on the keel’s edge, sliding and tearing up splinters, drove his fingers in, then brought up his feet and drove in his toes. The current’s drag threatened to dislodge him, until he released the crewmen, quickly stabbed his hand underneath the cable binding their wrists and slid it along his arm till the pair were dangling from its crook, then took a grip of the keel with his other hand. Now to climb.

Pulling free his right hand he reached up and drove it into the woodwork again, then one foot, then the other hand, the other foot. With painful slowness he began working his way out from the keel, across an upcurving ceiling of planking the size of a sports field. The two crewmen rode back along his arm until they were hanging from around his shoulder. Boxies zipped past as the ship accelerated, then a passing turbul closed its jaws on one crewman’s foot and Wade had to drive his fingers deeper into timber to prevent himself being dragged from the hull. The creature finally separated from its prey, though it took the foot with it.

Wade could have moved very much faster without his burden, but even though needing to get aboard the ship with some urgency, he stubbornly held onto the two rescued Hoopers.

Zephyr, wait for me. There’s something more you need to know.

It was a lie, but might be enough to delay the Golem sail, even though the threat of weapons fire from the Prador ship was growing less.

I have seen enough, said Zephyr. Life is at constant warwith Death, and I will strike a blow in that campaign… It is none of your concern.

Wade realized, by that last comment, that Zephyr was also conducting a conversation with the two living sails. Perhaps they would delay the Golem sail. Now reaching the steeper curve up to the side of the ship, Wade observed white water above him. Not far to go now. Then things began bumping against him in the water: reddish-brown, swan-necked, with long flat bodies.

Oh, you have got to be kidding.

One of the leeches attached to his exposed ankle and, with an electric screwdriver sound, reamed out a chunk of his syntheflesh. The predator then fell away, writhing like a blood worm, and spat out the unsavoury mouthful. Others attached to the two crewmen, taking out chunks of them too, but unable to enjoy seconds as the current swept them away. Wade concentrated on the task in hand—talking to Zephyr just slowed him down. If he did not get the pair of them out of the water soon, he would be rescuing nothing more than what the Hoopers called stripped-fish.

Finally reaching the surface he began hauling himself up the sheer face of the hull. Twenty metres up he passed one of the square windows, from which a female reification observed him, perhaps with bemusement—there was no way to tell. He saw her turn away and begin punching touch-plates on her computer’s console. Meanwhile, to his right the remains of a laser turret projecting from the hull kept turning towards him, spraying sparks as if in frustration. Finally, fifteen metres from the rail, a face peered down at him. There came a bellowed ‘Over here!’ and shortly after a rope uncoiled down to him. Once he grabbed it, he and his load were hauled rapidly up the side. His supposition that some kind of winch was in use was proved wrong on discovering Captain Ron at the other end of the rope.

‘That the lot of them?’ The Captain eyed the two figures now lying prostrate on the deck.

‘Four more down in our submersible enclosure,’ Wade informed him.

‘Forlam?’

‘Still aboard the Prador ship, trying to free Orbus and three others.’

Ron winced.

‘So how you gonna kill Death, then?’ asked Huff.

‘I told you… none of your concern.’

Zephyr swayed from side to side on the spar, glancing first over to where the Prador ship was surfacing half a kilometre away, then peering down at figures on the deck below. He had to leave soon. It had been a mistake his coming here to learn more about the enemy. What he had seen here only confused the issue, when in the beginning it had been so clear…

‘Death will end,’ said Zephyr firmly.

‘But how?’ Puff asked.

Before Zephyr could formulate a reply, Huff interjected, ‘If nothing dies we’ll be sitting neck-deep in leeches and prill, all eating each other and being eaten.’ Huff shook his crocodilian head. ‘Though admittedly things are not far off that around here.’

Zephyr observed Puff bow forward to catch Huff’s eye, raise a spiderclaw up to the side of her head to scribe a little circle, then shake her muzzle. Zephyr did not recognize what this meant until digging deep into his database.

‘I am not mad!’ he yelled.

‘Okay,’ said Puff. ‘Tell us exactly how you’re gonna “strike a blow in this campaign”. Or are your claims all piss and wind?’

Zephyr suddenly understood. Here he had encountered nothing but killers and the dying, because they were all the same. He had encountered nothing but argument for the same reason: they all served Death. That entity had put them here in his path to prevent him doing what he must do.

‘I will kill sprine,’ announced the Golem sail.

‘What? You can’t do that,’ said Huff. ‘How are you gonna do that?’

‘You won’t stop me, and you won’t change my mind.’ Zephyr began to spread his wings.

‘Wait.’ Huff reached out with his own wing, a few of his spiderclaws grabbing some of Zephyr’s wing bones. ‘You haven’t explained—’

In any war there are casualties—this is unavoidable. Zephyr focused on Huff, his particle cannon coming online easy as blinking. The flash and the subsequent screech negated everything else, and what remained of Huff fell like a smoking comet.

‘Huff! HUFF!’

Puff surged forwards, her jaws open wide, with a snarl beginning deep within her. Another flash, then more long-boned organic wreckage falling to the deck below.

Wings booming open, Zephyr launched himself from the mast. You won’t stop me, he thought, but was unable to articulate more than a scream.

Isis Wade’s words followed him into the sky: ‘What have you done?’

The corridor loomed as wide as a hangar and dank as a cave. Stepping out into it, Forlam immediately broke into a run. He glanced back to see Thirteen bobbing behind him, with a flicker of intense lasers all around as the drone attempted to flash out all the cameras around them. This time the drone certainly had no time to subvert them.

Foolish drone, thought Forlam. It should have fled while it had the chance. It could not know how little Forlam cared for his own life just at that moment.

Lice were now scuttling across the floor, probably shaken loose by the vibration of the ship’s turbines. Leaping a pile of human bones, Forlam quickly came to the end of the corridor, blocked by huge sloped gratings. To his left was the door he sought. It was split diagonally and partially open. There came a hammering from inside, and he saw blue fingers tugging at the gap.

‘Back off!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll burn you out!’

‘Whoo-is thaaat?’ came a sibilant hiss from inside.

‘Your rescuer. Move away from the door.’

‘Whois whosss?’

It occurred to Forlam then that opening this door might not be such a bright idea—but, what the hell, he was here now.

‘It’s Forlam, from Captain Ron’s crew.’

‘Forlaam off worldss.’

‘Well, I’m back now. Move away from the door!’

After a moment the fingers retreated and Forlam moved in close. He aimed his carbine waist-height just at the right of the diagonal gap, and fired. The dun metal surface glimmered under the laser, then suddenly grew painfully bright. There followed an intense flash, a smell like molten solder, and a wave of light and heat threw Forlam staggering back and down on his backside.

‘Oh… buggerit,’ was all he could think to say.

‘Prador exotic metal,’ said Thirteen, from somewhere to his side.

Forlam kept blinking, as his vision slowly returned in shades of grey. He finally noticed the drone hovering to one side of the door, its tail plugged into some kind of control pit.

‘Are you really sure you want this door open?’

‘Damnit, yes!’ Forlam scrambled to his feet.

A grinding sound from the wall was followed by a thump, as some sort of hydraulic system caught up with how far the door had already been prised open by those inside. Its two halves then began to revolve away into the wall, till the gap was a metre wide. The first figure stepped through, and Forlam recognized Orbus by his bulk and his clothing—but that was all. As the others came out after the Captain, Forlam emitted a nervous giggle. They all looked to be transforming into skinners.

‘Dronsesss!’ Orbus hissed, turning to look down the corridor, then something snapped past through the air between him and Forlam and exploded against the nearby wall. As the blast hurled Forlam to the floor again, he saw Thirteen slam against the far wall. Forlam rolled aside, grabbing for his dropped carbine, but then saw it glow red, and hurled himself away as it exploded. Hot metal spattered his back and he rolled trying to extinguish his burning clothing. Then Orbus came down on him, leech tongue waving.

Oh hell…

Orbus spun him over on his face and pulled something searing from his back, then flipped him over again and, sitting on Forlam’s stomach, held up a fragment of carbine.

‘Theresss.’

The hot metal sizzled in the Captain’s fingers, till after a moment he tossed it aside. Then, extruding his leech tongue again, he returned his attention directly to Forlam.

‘If you’d just like to get off me now?’ Forlam suggested.

There was no need, for another nearby explosion flung Orbus away from him. Forlam scrambled backwards, away from where the floor seemed to be burning. Then came a sound he recognized: the stuttering whoosh of a rail-gun firing. He turned just in time to see a huge Prador drone coming towards him, the space between him and it blackening with lines of projectiles. Then the projectiles struck something, igniting a translucent wall before him, bouncing off it and smashing into the corridor walls, floor and ceiling beyond. When the drone ceased firing, the wall blinked out.

Hard-field?

Forlam glanced behind to see Orbus and his three crewmen together moving crablike over to the corridor wall. Behind them a huge nautiloid drone hung in midair, with Thirteen clutched in one of its minor tentacles. Then it returned fire at the Prador drone.

Forlam just sat there thinking that now he was going to die. Abruptly it occurred to him that though such a process might have some fascination, it was only something you could go through once. He flung himself to the wall.

Another hard-field appeared, but this time the ricochets smashed around on Forlam’s side of it. One projectile fragment just nicked his ear before slamming into the wall beside his head. One of Orbus’s crewmen was flung away from his fellow by three successive hits. Orbus himself negligently pulled a projectile out of his chest and tossed it aside. It seemed a miracle that they had not all been chopped to pieces in this potential meat-grinder, then the firing abruptly ceased.

The safest place, Forlam decided, would be behind one of the drones, preferably the nautiloid one, which was probably Polity. He began edging along the wall in that direction, expecting the shooting between the two drones to start again at any moment. Strangely, nothing happened for long-drawn-out seconds, then suddenly the Prador drone was withdrawing, and a new vibration began shaking the ship.

‘That is the sweet sound of a fusion engine test,’ said the Polity drone. ‘And now the ship’s antigravity is coming online.’

‘Erm,’ was all Forlam managed.

A silver tentacle whipped out, wound around his waist, and hauled him in. He only realized the others had been grabbed when, drawn close to the drone’s cold body, he found himself pressed against someone else’s back. Luckily the woman could not turn her head or extend her tongue far enough, else Forlam felt sure he would have lost an eye to her.

Then the rescuing drone was moving very fast along the ship’s corridors. A door disintegrated before it, another stretch of corridor, another door turned to fragments, then some kind of chamber opening to a triangular patch of sky. They shot out above a waterfall—sea water pouring from that chamber—then over the sea. Forlam glimpsed the Prador ship turning, like a city detached from the ground, till the drone turned sharply and accelerated across the ocean, cutting that view. He now spotted an island and, distantly, the Sable Keech. When the drone dipped down towards the island, Forlam prayed he would not be left there with Orbus and his merry crew. Before he could think to protest, he was released to drop onto a wooden deck. As immediately he scrambled away from the woman’s horrible wriggling tongue, his back came to rest against a pair of solid legs.

‘Well, that’s a bugger—we ain’t got no rope left,’ said a familiar voice.

An equally familiar one added, ‘Nor any harpoons.’

The news from one of the passengers, that she had seen some man climbing the side of the hull carrying two blue corpses on his back, had not attracted Janer’s attention so much as watching the Prador ship rise from the ocean. Now the spaceship was just sitting motionless in the sky. It had not reacted to the Golem sail taking wing, nor had it reacted to a human figure with metal hands and feet departing the deck, suspended in an AG harness. Now he had missed out, for after committing murder the Golem sail was gone, and Isis Wade had gone after it.

‘Here we are,’ said Captain Ron, as they entered the submersible enclosure.

Janer stared at the four lying on the floor. Unlike the two he had earlier seen up on deck, these were struggling against their bonds, trying to chew through the cables binding their wrists, when their serpentine tongues did not get in the way. Seeing Janer and Ron with the six accompanying Hoopers, all four of them struggled to their feet and tried to make a break for it, issuing whooping hissing sounds as they ran around the enclosure. Ron stepped back and closed the door, resting his back against it. He folded his arms. ‘Go get ‘em, lads.’

The six Hoopers gave chase, quickly clubbing two of the four to the ground and binding their legs with reels of ducting tape. A third was tackled just before managing to throw himself out through the shimmer-shield. The fourth ran straight into Ron’s fist and sat down abruptly with his eyes crossed. Janer looked down at the gun he had drawn and sighed. Then he looked around, realizing that here was his opportunity, for Wade had told him Zephyr’s intended destination. Janer holstered his weapon.

‘Ron, I have to leave,’ he announced.

The Captain raised an eyebrow as, one-handed, he hoisted the stunned Hooper to his feet. ‘Where?’

‘Places to go, things to do.’ Janer headed for the submersible, climbed the ladder and stepped into the conning tower. ‘This is important. Don’t try to stop me.’

Ron was showing no sign of doing any such thing. He waved a dismissive hand at Janer, then rapped his captive’s head against the wall as the Hooper showed signs of regaining consciousness.

Janer dropped inside the submersible, sat down in the pilot’s seat and studied the controls. Simple really. He turned on the screens giving him an outside view, waited until the Hooper currently between him and the shimmer-shield had dragged his captive aside, then hit the touch-plate labelled launch.

The acceleration flung him hard back into the seat. Then the shield rapidly approached, engulfed the sub, and he was hurtling through white water. He pulled safety straps down and clicked them into place, before taking hold of the joystick. It was standard simple format: you moved the stick in the direction you wanted to go, and the further you moved it in that direction the faster you got there. He pulled the stick up, heard the engine roar behind him, and felt the seat press up against his backside.

‘Whooo! Hoo!’

The sub leapt from the ocean like a dolphin and came down in an explosion of spume. A further tinkering with the controls gave him a positional map. On that he located ‘Olian’s’ clearly marked, experimentally shifted the stick from side to side so the submersible icon on the map turned, then finally got it directed towards that same location. He then pushed the stick forwards and the acceleration forced him back in his seat. Eyeing the many readouts before him, he wondered if he would recognize one warning him that the engine was overheating and burning out. Then he relaxed and thought about what he had learnt: how mistaken had been the young hive mind, and how more deadly were the intentions of one part of that ancient mind: Zephyr.

Hive minds were now unlikely to send their agents here to obtain sprine. Firstly, because with all that by now was known about this planet’s life forms, right down to their genomes, any focused research would ascertain the poison’s formula offworld. But, secondly and most importantly, because here was the only place it could be used and the Warden would not allow that. No, the agent of one half of the ancient hive mind had not come here for that purpose, since it already possessed the formula.

Wade had explained to him: ‘Each separate part of the mind can work on things without the other parts knowing. On the planet Hive, the Zephyr part of the mind synthesized sprine then, using the advanced genetic manipulation technologies known there, made a virus to destroy it.’

‘But why do that?’ Janer had asked.

‘Because here sprine is Death, and Zephyr wants to kill Death.’

‘You’re saying Zephyr could release that virus at any moment? Do you realize what might happen? We have to stop him now!’

Wade shook his head. ‘The small quantity Zephyr carries would be unlikely to survive long enough in this environment to propagate. Any leech infected by it would quickly die and be destroyed by all the other predators here. In such a situation the chances of it spreading planetwide are less than ten per cent.’

‘Oh, that’s okay then.’

‘It is, admittedly, an appreciable risk.’

‘How does Zephyr intend to up those odds?’

‘The virus needs to be added to a very large quantity of sprine. With a sufficient food supply it can double its mass every few minutes, and it will then spread itself via a form of air- or water-borne sporulation.’

‘A large quantity of sprine?’

Wade had nodded.

‘Olian’s,’ realized Janer.

You waited too long, Wade.

Janer considered what might be the result of Zephyr’s attempt to kill Death. The collapse of the present planetary economy, which was based on sprine, was the least significant worry. Through long and painful experience, humans had learnt how subtly balanced were all ecologies. The big leeches topped the food chain here, consuming whole other large creatures living in the ocean. Without them, therefore, their prey would just keep on growing and feeding, wiping out other species and causing a further cascade of imbalances. All the leeches would then die out, because it was only the large ones that procreated. Some might think that a good thing. It was not. If they were lucky, some new balance might be restored—in about ten thousand years or so. Quite possibly the entire biosphere would collapse into something almost Precambrian.

Janer tried forcing the joystick even further forward, but it was already at its limit.

With her single remaining eye, the giant whelk gazed behind herself and down towards the beach. Observing swarms of juvenile rhinoworms gradually venturing ashore, she again tested the ropes securing her, but found little give in them. There was even less give in the numerous harpoons embedded in her flesh, for it had healed around them, holding them firmer. She was now so exhausted and hungry she found it difficult to think. When she did manage to mull over what had happened, she felt hurt. It seemed almost like the betrayal of some contract in which she pursued the ships and they fled. They should not have stopped and ambushed her in this way. That was so unfair.

Turning her eye further, to study her shell, she observed that the split in it had nearly closed up. With luck it would be fully sealed before the rhinoworms started chewing pieces out of her, for if those things found their way in there, to her softer parts, it would all be quickly over. However, if she remained trapped here like this, she would still die. It might take them longer to munch away her harder extremities, but they would never give up. She struggled again, the harpoon wounds aching in her flesh and the trees around her shaking. Some of them did loosen a bit, but the taut ropes binding her to immovable outcrops of rock prevented her getting the leverage to pull the looser trees completely free. Then, vibrating through the ground from the ocean bed, she heard a familiar thumping.

The male whelk was out there. If she could attract him in he might be able to free her, but to do that she needed to free at least one tentacle. She struggled again, some of the ropes definitely slacker now, but every effort left her weaker. She focused her attention on one tentacle only: the one from which the fishing line depended. There was a harpoon driven right through it, a metre back from the tip of it. Folding that tip up, she could just touch the thick rope stretching taut from the harpoon’s shaft to a nearby tree. That was all she could manage, but remembering how the fishing line had cut so easily through heirodont flesh and gristle, she now had an idea. Flipping the free extremity of tentacle, she whipped the line up from the sandy soil. It looped up and touched the rope, before dropping down again. After five attempts she got part of it up and over the rope, but it slid off again. On her fourteenth attempt it went over, and she finally caught hold of the line’s loose end with her tentacle tip, wrapping it round securely. Just then pain messages began to register from some of her other tentacles. The rhinoworms were beginning to tentatively gnaw on her flesh.

Pulling on the line itself only tugged the rope down, making the harpoon tilt. It was only by accident, when her grip slipped for a moment and she drew the line across the rope, that she observed a few severed fibres spring up. Urgently, she began sawing the line back and forth.

By now some of the rhinoworms, finding she was not retaliating, were biting a lot harder, and the commotion they were making was attracting many more who were heading rapidly up from the beach.

Finally, the rope parted, and the giant whelk twisted her tentacle to snap off the harpoon haft. Then reaching over to snatch up the most persistent rhinoworm, she raised the writhing creature and used it like a rubber drumstick to beat a tattoo on her shell. The male whelk out at sea responded with an excited drumming. The rhinoworm, its skull now shattered, she fed under her skirt, to her beak, and quickly devoured. Now she reached round to tackle the next harpoon, trying to tug it out. But it was stuck solid and, with its rope still attached, she could not get enough leverage with just one tentacle to break the haft. At least there was less urgency now the rhinoworms had retreated a little way. Realizing that once she freed another tentacle things would get very much easier, she looped the line over another rope and again began to saw. She was about halfway through when the waiting rhinoworms began running for cover. A crusted shell had broken the ocean’s surface and begun to head ashore.

Extending her remaining eye rearwards, the female giant whelk watched the male approach. She did not like the look of his shell for, encrusted like that, it looked untidy, and meant he spent most of his time on the bottom. He was smaller, as all males were, but it struck her that this one was particularly scrawny. He oozed onto the sand, moved up to the edge of the clearing and halted, focusing both eyes down to where a rope was tied around a rocky outcrop. He tracked the rope up to the harpoon embedded in her body, then his eyes swung apart to take in the other ropes. She tugged briefly on a couple of them to be sure he got the idea. He paused, mulling the situation over, then reached out a tentacle and plucked the nearest rope like a guitar string. She wondered if he was particularly thick when he moved aside and chose to slide towards her up the lane between two ropes, careful to avoid dislodging any of them. When he reached her and reared up, extruding the long, tubular, glassy corkscrew of his penis, she realized he had certainly assessed the situation here.

Angrily the giant female thrashed back at him with her one free tentacle, which was larger and more powerful than any of his. But, having all his free, he caught hold of it and held it down against her shell. His penis partially unwound, probing under the back lip of her shell. At this point, instinct took over in her, and she extruded some of her softer body from underneath her shell. His penis felt this, and snapped out straight, stabbing deep inside her. Feeling something that was both pain and pleasure she emitted a hissing squeal. Letting loose a series of whistling hoots, he began rocking back and forth, his penis groping around between her internal organs. One organ reacted, opening with a ripping feeling inside her, and he soon found it. She bucked hard in reaction, and observed a couple of trees go crashing down. His flailing about dislodged one rope so its looped end snapped up free of the outcrop to which it was secured. This constant rocking motion loosened a harpoon embedded near his entry point, and the growing mass of slime there lubricated its progress out of her body. Then, with a final long-drawn-out hoot he filled her up, and with a gasp came to rest flat and limp against her. Screwing itself back out of her, his penis dropped flaccid into the sand.

The female felt strangely invigorated by this mating. Peering at the male, she observed his eyes blinking tiredly, and felt his grip slackening. Pulling her tentacle free, she snatched up the loose harpoon and drove it deep between his eyes. He squealed and retreated, becoming entangled in a fallen tree. Turning, she brought more trees crashing down and snapped two more ropes. Now with four tentacles unrestrained, she used them to snap harpoon shafts one after another, till finally breaking free. Her assailant meanwhile crushed his way over foliage and began heading back for the shore. She surged forward, picked up the relevant rope and waited. As the rope drew taut, he was jerked to a halt. Gradually she began to reel him in, clacking her beak the while. The reversal would have been lost on her: he’d had his way with her and now, dinner.