The Voyage of the Sable Keech

14

The spaceship surfaced from U-space like a volcanic island heaving up out of the ocean: something hot and titanic, vaporizing anything that touched it. Immediately alerted, the Warden observed it through some of his deep-space eyes, and in that interval the rent through from U-space had yet to close. The thing was three kilometres long, nearly as wide, and a kilometre deep. Inevitably its shape was similar to a Prador’s carapace, but one distorted by encrustations that the Warden was uncomfortably aware were powerful weapons systems.

That was quick, was the AI’s immediate thought.

This Prador ship must only have been days away from the system.

Immediately upon that thought, the Warden’s suspicions were aroused: Why so close?

‘Prador vessel, this is the Warden of Spatterjay opening communication,’ the AI sent.

The huge ship continued into the system on a dirty fusion drive that caused a lot of interference with the Warden’s link to its scattered eyes. The AI knew that Prador fusion drives were as efficient as Polity ones, producing less than 15–12 % total fuel burn as isotope pollution. The interference was deliberate, which probably meant this spaceship contained technology the Prador did not want the Polity to know about. Such an action could be simply a sensible precaution of creatures keeping their offensive and defensive capabilities secret, but there could also be a more sinister purpose behind that.

‘Prador vessel, this is the Warden of Spatterjay. Please respond.’

Nothing. The Warden became uncomfortably aware of how Coram lay, at present, directly in the vessel’s path. The AI now considered initiating the moon base’s defence systems, but that might be taken as undue provocation. Instead it sent signals to move its eyes in closer—a different kind of provocation. Side thrusters now fired, turning the behemoth round. The rear drives dropped to a spluttering low-power burn, then went up to full power when the vessel lay rear-end towards Coram and the planet. This burn lasted only a few minutes before shutting off. It was perfectly timed so that the ship now drifted in surrounded by a screen of radioactive gas. Then a powerful signal came through and the Warden was looking into a Prador captain’s sanctum.

‘Communication acknowledged,’ came the reply in human tongue, but there was no sign of any Prador in that sanctum.

‘How do you wish to proceed in retrieving your citizen?’ the Warden immediately sent.

Now a shape finally moved into view, and the AI wondered about the paranoia evident aboard the Prador ship, for the respondent wore heavy exotic metal armour. Then he realized that this individual must be one of the King’s Guard, for they all wore armour like this.

‘Transmit details,’ said the Prador.

By transmitting most of those details verbally, the Warden gave itself long seconds to think. ‘I was informed of the disappearance of a sailing vessel on Spatterjay and sent my drones to investigate. Traces of Prador exotic metal were found in the sunken wreck of that ship—map location inserted—and the crew is missing. I sent my drones then to the location of Ebulan’s spaceship—map location. It has been moved, most likely to the Lamarck Trench. It seems likely that the Prador Vrell, who was Ebulan’s first-child, now has control of Ebulan’s ship.’

‘Why is this first-child alive? I was informed at the time that Ebulan and all his kin were terminated.’

Interesting. The Warden could not help but speculate how long this ship had been waiting outside the Spatterjay system. Ten years perhaps? Had Ebulan succeeded here, would he have been allowed to return to the Prador Third Kingdom?

‘How should I address you?’ the Warden asked.

‘I am… Vrost.’

‘Vrost, please send me all you know concerning the events here,’ said the Warden.

After a long delay an information package came through. The Warden opened it in programming space designated for potential viral/worm attacks. There was no danger in it, however, and the AI soon ascertained that though the Prador knew most of the story, there were certain critical gaps in that knowledge.

‘As you know,’ said the Warden, ‘Vrell was sent to the island on a suicide mission to kill those Old Captains who could bear witness to Ebulan’s involvement in Jay Hoop’s human-coring trade. But, transforming into an adult there, Vrell was able to disobey his father’s orders. After Ebulan’s ship went down, he made the attempt to return to it. No further action was taken against him because, first, it was unlikely he could survive the underwater journey to the ship and, second, it seemed an impossibility that he could survive the remaining booby traps his father would have installed in it.’

‘How did you bring down Ebulan’s ship?’ the Prador asked.

‘How long have you been waiting outside this system?’ the Warden countered.

There came no reply, nor for another six hours. After that time the Prador ship again activated side thrusters, this time to divert its course behind Coram and down towards Spatterjay. The Warden’s patience then ran out.

‘Vrost, since you have seen fit to cease communicating, I can do no less in response than activate my lowest level defensive/offensive capability.’

The Warden activated the moon base’s defensive system, and observed weapons turrets breaking up through Coram’s icy sulphurous crust all around. They rose like giant tube-worms into vacuum, folding armoured plates away from the business ends of near-C rail-guns, antiphoton cannons and particle-beam projectors. Racks of smart missiles folded up into view like collections of pan pipes. This was not the AI’s ‘lowest level defensive/offensive capability’, but all it possessed. It was also something the citizens in the base could not avoid witnessing through the chainglass panoramic windows. Queries started coming in through personal comps and augs. The Warden put up a bulletin:

BUFFER TECHNICAL FAULT DUE TO MICRO-METEORITE PUNCTURES. FURTHER METEORITE ACTIVITY IMMINENT. RUNCIBLE IS NOW OPEN PORT TO ALL SYSTEMS.

Of course, the Warden had been here before.

FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE AND SAFETY, ALL CITIZENS PLEASE PROCEED TO THE RUNCIBLE GATE.

The runcible was soon throwing people away from the moon just as fast as possible, to be caught by whichever runcibles were available to catch them. Some of those travellers might find themselves hundreds of light years away. There was no real panic, but then many Polity citizens had never faced a physical threat at any time in their lives. For most of them this seemed an enjoyable bit of excitement. Fielding a growing number of queries, the Warden noticed a small percentage of people who were clearly dubious about the board messages.

‘You lying fuck, Warden,’ said a three-hundred-year-old woman as she hurried towards the runcible. Checking her ident package and cross-referencing it to traveller lists stored from ten years ago, the AI ascertained that, like the rest of the doubters, she had been here the last time this happened, too.

‘Lock down and full defences,’ the Warden told the submind running the planetary base.

‘Ah, it’s getting nasty, then.’

‘Not yet, but it would be best to be prudent.’

Just then the Prador captain communicated.

‘None of your present weapons are capable of bringing down a Prador light destroyer, such as Ebulan’s, let alone my ship,’ it observed.

‘I am glad you have decided to continue our communication. I would not want to proceed to defence level seven, nor six.’

‘I have scanned the moon on which you are situated. You possess no further armament.’

‘Ever heard of chameleonware?’

An encoded message came through from a different source. ‘Ooh, what porky pies you’ve been telling.’

‘Shut up, Seven,’ said the Warden, observing that the turbot drone was now moonlighting by carrying passengers’ luggage to the runcible.

This time the reply from the Prador captain took an hour to arrive, while its ship went into orbit around Spatterjay. The radioactive cloud surrounding the vessel was dispersing now, but still isotopes coating its exotic metal surface concealed much. Some areas were also very well shielded. However, the Warden now had a clear and detailed exterior view, and could see huge blockish shapes shifting position on the warship’s hull. This time the communication began with a map, sans ocean, of Spatterjay’s surface, the Lamarck Trench being indicated by Prador positional glyphs.

The warship captain asked, ‘Is this sub-oceanic feature the Lamarck Trench?’

The Warden considered denial, but only momentarily.

‘It is.’

Shapes began launching from the warship and spreading out through space. Some of them were war drones, others were Prador in that heavy armour, hundreds of them. Then out of the ship’s hull folded one of those titanic blockish structures, and the Warden picked up energy signatures it knew indicated the charging of a massive coil-gun.

‘Your actions would indicate,’ suggested the Warden, ‘that Vrell is not to be welcomed back into the Prador Third Kingdom?’

Detecting a slight rise in background residual radiation, Sniper suppressed a surge of excitement. There were deposits of pitchblende on the bottom of the ocean, and the briefly radioactive current could have picked up some of that anywhere. Scanning into ultraviolet, he watched a scarf of blue water dissipating behind him. There were similar blue areas in a chaotic boulder-field where part of the cliff had collapsed. He rose higher to get a wider view over the field, then descended at an angle towards the largest area of blue. It seemed to be seeping from some kind of cavern. Sniper hesitated at the entrance. Certainly no Prador vessel was concealed in there, but perhaps here was some clue.

As he made the decision to enter, a black glister surged out with its claws spread threateningly. Upon observing him, it began frantically sculling itself to one side. It held something in its mandibles—something that glowed into the ultraviolet. Sniper stabbed out a tentacle and slapped hard behind the creature’s head, and in a cloud of blue the glister released its prize, but clamped a claw on the offending tentacle. Sniper flicked the glister, tumbling, away and turned his attention to picking up what it had dropped. At first it was only identifiable as a lump of flesh and gristle clinging to a bone, but Sniper needed no new programs to quickly recognize the bone as a human tibia. He dropped the remnant just as the glister attacked again, this time closing both its claws together on one of his tentacles. He reached out with two more and tore the creature in half, before finally entering the cave.

Ultraviolet revealed killing levels of radiation as a luminescent blue fog that obscured all view in that part of the spectrum. Infrared revealed seven glisters fighting over something. Two of them turned towards him, and he hit them both with his dissuader. Broiled bright red, they sank to the bottom. Only then taking some notice of the Warden’s instructions concerning the local fauna, he slid around behind the feeding creatures and tried to drive them out of the cave. They would not be driven, he being of a size that perhaps this pod of glisters thought they could handle. He tried ultrasound, infrasound, just simply pushing them with his tentacles, then, his patience at an end, he hit them all in turn with high-power ultrasound pulses. When, internally shattered, they all sank to the bottom, he closed in and pulled their twitching hard-shelled bodies away from the prey.

There was little left: just disjointed bones, torn flesh and skin, and some rags of clothing. The skull of this crewman, who must have come from the Vignette, had been crushed, and the brains sucked out. A spider thrall lay nearby. Sniper scanned it, but it was offline, emitting no carrier signal, so there was nothing for him to track. He backed out of the cave and sent a description of his finds to Eleven and Twelve.

‘So we’re close, then,’ replied Twelve.

‘Certainly hot,’ Eleven quipped.

‘Possibly,’ said Sniper. ‘We don’t know how far this corpse was carried by the current or by those fighting for a mouthful of it, and it might also have been dumped from Vrell’s ship while it was in transit. Make sure you scan for radioactivity.’

‘I have been,’ said Twelve. ‘I’m coming up out of the end of my particular tributary, and I’ve detected something about a kilometre out from me.’

‘Send it,’ said Sniper, then viewed the distant blob, blued by ultraviolet and rendered unrecognizable by distance. Now Twelve was sending a narrow-beam sonar image, slowly building. Sniper guessed what he was seeing, just by the size and general spherical shape. His guess was confirmed when things began detaching from the distant object and heading towards Twelve.

‘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.

‘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.

Ah, flowers…

The island was definitely volcanic—it could not have borne a more classically volcanic shape. And now, in the shallow seas surrounding it, Janer observed masses of lily pads bearing blowsy blue flowers. There were also things swimming amid those masses of vegetation, but it could not discern whether they were rhinoworms or medium-sized sea leeches.

‘Zephyr has a curious fascination with lilies,’ came a voice from behind, ‘but then he has a curious fascination with anything related to death.’

‘You walk very soft, Wade,’ said Janer, removing the intensifier from his eyes.

‘I’m no clunking robot, if that’s what you mean.’ Isis Wade stepped up beside him.

‘There’s a lot of things you are not. What I’d like to know is precisely what you are.’

‘Isn’t that something we’d all like to know?’

‘Don’t start waxing philosophical on me. You know what I mean.’

‘Explanations?’ asked Wade.

‘It’s about time, while this calm lasts.’ Janer gestured to a squad of Kladites marching along the deck below.

‘Yes…’ said Wade. ‘Very well, I do represent an ancient hive mind. I in fact do more than that. Have you ever wondered why there are separate distinct hive minds rather than just one mind encompassing the entire hornet species?’

‘I can’t say it’s been very high on my mental agenda.’

‘I suppose not, and really I cannot clearly answer that question. Perhaps, just like individuality in any species, and the reasons for sex, it is a survival strategy. Perhaps, back before even dinosaurs walked the Earth, there was just one mind. Who knows? What I do know is that now there are many minds, and the way more are created is by the division, the breaking apart, of larger, older minds as the masses of hives that carry them become… unwieldy.’

‘The mind I represented was young,’ Janer observed.

‘It was: just one fragment that survived of a mind that broke apart during an ice age. Hornets do not cope well with the cold, which is why none of the other fragments survived.’

‘No, really?’ said Janer.

Wade smiled and continued, ‘On Hive it is warm, and on Earth hives are better equipped against the cold, but ancient minds still face that threat of division—death to them individually, or maybe just death to their individuality. The mind I represent is so dividing and would have had to accept its lot, had it not been for human technology. But now there is the possibility of memcording. The mind has managed to hold itself together, in so much as it has so far only divided into two. One half is rational and prepared to memcord itself and accept that as life. The other half is… unbalanced. It will not accept death, believes death an entity to be fought. Nor can it accept memcording as life.’

‘Rather like our friends here, who don’t truly consider reification life, merely a kind of purgatory.’ Janer shrugged. ‘Well, something like that.’

‘I don’t just represent the mind,’ said Wade.

‘What do you represent?’

‘One half of the argument.’

‘What?’

‘The other half is Zephyr.’

Janer just stood there staring as he realized what he was being told. After a moment he asked, ‘Which half are you?’

‘The rational half, of course.’

‘So let me get this straight.’ Janer pointed above. ‘We’ve got the nuts half of an ancient hive mind up there in a Golem sail. It doesn’t accept memcording as life, yet it is a memcording itself. You are the sane half, if that’s possible.’

‘Yes, that’s about right.’

‘What do you hope to achieve here?’

‘I hope to persuade Zephyr to accept memcording as life—to accept rationality over the visceral or emotional. If it accepts that, a template of its understanding can be transmitted via hivelink back to Hive. This will enable the two halves of my other self to come together for memcording.’

‘And if you fail?’

‘Then this,’ Wade pressed his hand against his own chest, ‘is the best my other self might achieve, and it must therefore accept dissolution.’

‘So no sprine thefts, no attempts at planetary domination involved here, just a bit of literal psychoanalytical projection?’

‘There is a further complication, and it does concern sprine.’

‘Isn’t there always? Tell me about it.’

Wade then explained to him why Zephyr was here, and Janer felt himself grow cold. He looked off past the Golem, across the ship to the further horizon.

‘That’s bad,’ he said.

‘Yes, it is.’

After a moment Janer realized he could not actually see the horizon, and he also realized that the Sable Keech was heeling over and turning hard. He again raised his intensifier to his eyes.

‘And talking of bad.’

The cloud, laced with lightning, looked like a roller of wild bruised flesh. The wave, hammering towards them below it, was higher than their ship, and looked more solid still.

‘Keep us turning. I want us bows-on towards that mess. Zephyr, start reefing all sail right now,’ said Captain Ron. ‘Then get yourself and your friends to cover or in the air—whichever you prefer.’

‘Is that a good idea?’ asked John Styx who, without protest from Ron, had taken up position at the coms console. ‘It’ll slow our turn.’

The Sable Keech was turning slowly while that wave, and the storm riding it, was coming bloody fast. Sideways on, the ship would capsize, and it would probably then stay that way, despite the heavy machinery acting as ballast down in the bilge.

‘We’ll be able to make the turn under present momentum,’ Ron replied. ‘If we leave sail on, that might tear out the masts, holing the deck and possibly the hull. We really don’t want holes in this ship right now.’

Bows on, the Sable Keech might be able to stay on the surface, though Ron thought it likely the wave still would break its back. That way, however, at least the passengers and crew might survive the coming experience.

‘Everybody been warned?’ Ron asked generally.

‘I’ve been repeating the warning over the ship’s intercom, and putting it up on every cabin screen,’ said John Styx. ‘Others are spreading the word, where they can.’

‘Ah, good.’ Ron eyed the others on the bridge. Then, entertaining a suspicion, he turned his attention to Forlam. ‘You got that rudder hard over, Forlam?’

‘Certainly have.’ Forlam gazed at the approaching wave with his eyes glittering.

Ron reached out to grab the helm and tug at it a little, to make sure Forlam was not making any small but possibly fatal mistake, as was his tendency. He found the helm was hard over, however. Forlam gave him a hurt look, then returned his attention to the wave.

‘Nearly there. We’re gonna make it, boys,’ said Ron.

Others on the bridge, looking doubtful, kept clinging to the nearest handholds. Ron himself reached out and closed his hand around a nearby stanchion. Something big had hit: this looked like the wave thrown up by a seaborne atomic explosion, of which Ron had seen his fair share during the Prador war. It might have been seven or more centuries ago, but you tended not to forget stuff like that.

‘What do you reckon caused it?’ Ron asked, generally.

‘Dunno, Captain,’ came the general reply from the Hoopers.

It struck the Old Captain that his bridge crew was not overly gifted with imagination anyway, so he turned to Styx. ‘Any ideas?’

Styx studied the displays. ‘It was an orbital kinetic strike over the Lamarck Trench in Nort Sea.’

‘Right. And the source?’

‘Prador battleship. A big one.’

‘Well, that’s a bugger,’ said Ron, just as the massive wave hit.

The Sable Keech did not lie completely bows-on to the wave. Nevertheless it rose up and up on a sudden mountain of water only just visible through horizontal rain. Ron looked up at the boiling cliff of sea as it broke round and over the bows, and clung on tight as the floor turned up to forty-five degrees, then beyond that. He looked back, and wished he hadn’t when he saw the seven-hundred-metre drop down the length of the ship into the trough. The stern was now under, cleaving through the sea and throwing up a huge cowl of water that kept crashing against the deck. Ron tried to ignore the groanings and crackings he was hearing, then suddenly the bows were in clear air, and the angle of the ship returning to normal. But the vessel now turned on the wave’s peak… Then it was over, and sliding sideways down the lee of the wave. Ron found himself clinging to the stanchion with both hands, one foot braced on a console. Forlam was gripping the wheel, his feet wide spread. A screen popped out and a waterfall roared into the bridge as the ship bottomed in a trough.

‘Rudder—other way!’ Ron bellowed.

Forlam started spinning the helm—no strength being required since the rudder operated by hydraulics. The ship started to present its stern to the next, smaller wave, and went up over that one at an angle. Another wave, then another. Now came a shuddering crash as the Sable Keech dropped down in the next trough. It rose again on a wide swell, crashed down again. Staring straight ahead, Ron observed just how much closer the island now appeared. Steam was billowing from its volcanic cone, and where once there had been trees there was now just the wreckage of trees and mud. Eyeing the sea, he observed lily pads bobbing back to the surface and then reopening their blowsy flowers.

‘We’re grounded,’ someone announced.

‘Yup, I figured that,’ replied Ron.

‘How we going to get this ship off?’ the same man asked.

‘Ain’t figured that one yet,’ admitted the Old Captain.

The giant whelk dipped herself back in the sea, but could no longer detect the scent trail of the ship she had been pursuing. Heaving herself back up onto the beach, she gazed towards the horizon with her huge eyes, and experienced a feeling of panicky bewilderment. This sudden loss of purpose caused almost a feeling a deflation in the growing lobes of her brain, and she felt the loss of that, rather than of the scent, as of greater importance to her. But the ship was not gone—itself or one very much like it would be out there. All she needed to do was search, keep on searching, and never stop. It then occurred to her that if she found the same ship, dragged it down and crushed it, chewed on the crew… if she finally achieved her aim, that meant no more aim to achieve. She blinked, caught on the rusty nail of paradox, not knowing it was much the same as faced by all thinking beings. Then she swivelled her eye-stalks to one side, wondering why the horizon there had suddenly risen.

Uncomprehending, the giant whelk watched as a glassy hill of sea rolled towards her, then some buried instinct had her sucking back in her eyes, and bunching together her tentacles. The wave, carrying less momentum now than when it had struck the Sable Keech, picked her up like flotsam and tumbled her away from the island. Brief chaos ensued, then, drifting below the surface, the whelk unknotted her tentacles, extruded her eyes again, sucked in some of the offending water. Strange flavours tantalized her taste buds, and she decided immediately to track back this phenomenon to its source. Anything rather than return to her previous plodding and thoughtless existence.