Another attack from the SMs. Ebulan released five missiles on random trajectories to pull them off.
What? The last blank went too, collapsing into pieces. Pilot held a shell cutter, and was coming this way. What? Armoured doors were opening and closing back there. How? Something above, but now control codes were going haywire, and external vision was fading. Behind Ebulan, the shell cutter screamed as it bit into the armoured door. He spun around and stared at the door in horror, blind now to everything outside his ship.
Sniper gazed down at the planet through the Prador drone’s eye pits, and all he got was an image in shades of grey. Well, he thought, if that was how they saw the universe, it was no wonder they were so unfriendly. Switching back to his remaining palp-eye he got the same image in panoramic colour, before turning that eye to the stars. Might be the last time he saw them, he thought, then berated himself for getting all slushy. Then reversing AG on his cobbled-together vehicle, he plummeted for the planet below.
‘Hey, Warden, what’s the SP?’ he asked.
‘Sniper, I see that underestimation of you has been somewhat of a fault in your enemies. Do you think you’ll manage to stay on target?’
‘Yeah, but I might not get there all in one piece.’
‘Then,’ said the Warden, ‘you’ll be glad to know that I’ve just broken the Prador control code, and the master of that ship is not having a very good time.’
‘Well, if you’ve broken the code, that means you’ve got some capacity spare to receive me,’ replied the war drone.
‘You’re prepared for subsumption then?’ asked the Warden.
‘Not really,’ said Sniper, ‘but it beats actually dying.’ As he said this, he felt the underspace link with the Warden open and consolidate. This was strictly his option, and it seemed like an open pit-trap to him. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘a guy once called me ugly inside and out.’
‘And what was your response to that?’ asked the Warden.
‘Cut his head off,’ Sniper replied, and so saying began to hum a tune over the ether. Then the old war drone grated out the words to a song:
‘There once was an ugly duckling, its feathers all tatty and brown.’
The armoured shell exceeded fifteen thousand kilometres per hour through the stratosphere. Sniper fed all power not already being sucked away by the reverse AG into the Prador shield, and by distorting its focus managed to cone it out in front. This gave him another couple of thousand kph, even with increasing air resistance. Now he also fed pure water into the fusion boosters and accelerated.
‘All the other birds, in so many words, said—’
From the Prador ship, precisely in the predicted position below him, no weapons were fired, and no shields swung into place. In this last second Sniper managed to broadcast his final words, before transmitting himself.
‘Quack, get out of town.’
The explosion blew plasma through the central corridor. The dead blanks lying there were picked up in the blast and turned to oily flame. The wave of fire hit the weakened door into the control area and folded it back. Instrument panels and dead blanks alike were pasted against the inner hull by the blast, and feedback knocked out generator after generator. AG motors shut off; others came on and were instantly fused by power surges. The thrusters went out, and Ebulan’s ship dropped from the sky like a brick. Now direct-linked into the controls, Ebulan gave off bubbling screams as those links fed power back to him, and set two of his control boxes on fire. He slammed against the wall of his chamber, and his own AG went out. He had just regained enough control to get the shields out underneath the ship to absorb most of the shock. But projectors burnt out as the ship hurtled towards the sea, then slammed into the waves. Seawater exploded out from under the destroyer as it settled, almost gracefully at the last.
Then the water washed back. And the ship sank.
I’m alive, Ebulan thought. I can survive this. Just then, the door behind him gave way and Pilot reeled into the chamber wielding the shell cutter, ready to carry through the last instructions the Warden had programmed into him.
Ebulan’s bubbling screams continued until water came flooding into the ship through the hole Sniper had punched through its hull.
But even that did not stop the ancient blank. Pilot continued to hack away at his Prador master until there was nothing left to see in the soupy water — and the power pack of the cutter was totally drained.
As Sniper arrived, the Warden felt an almost excited anticipation of the coming subsumption. There would be so much to upload from the ancient drone: the memories and experiences; the direct recordings of events Sniper had seen with his own palp eyes; ancient battles and scenes from worlds now metres deep in radioactive ash. Then would come the long overdue — and pleasurable — task of reprogramming that infectively abrasive personality and making Sniper into somebody a little more tolerable. The Warden put online the overlay personality programs, and the necessary search-and-destroy programs. However, its excitement began to turn to dismay when the drone’s mind just kept on arriving… and arriving.
20
The giant leech surfaced and rolled as the molly carp tore out through its side, then dived, and with its flat tentacles dragged itself with all speed back to its atoll. The huge wound the leech had received would not have been enough to kill it, had not its bile duct continued pumping bile with increasing levels of sprine into the injury. So the leech died by poisoning itself, and as it died it sank. For some while, nothing came to feed upon the corpse, as the sprine diffusing into the sea deterred them. Once the poison had diluted enough, first to come were the boxies. In huge shoals they quickly snatched what they could, while they could. A small flock of frog whelks came next from a nearby islet, eager to feed on both boxies and leech. Then came hammer whelks sneaking up on their kin, shattering their shells with an enthusiastic racket that of course attracted turbul… then glisters… It was unfortunate that all this was still happening near the edge of the oceanic trench. Dinner-plate eyes observed the descending debris and tiny brains wondered what had attracted their fellow residents up there — so ascended to find out. And as an organic cloud again spread across the seabed, siphons, noses, antennae, and organs not easily described twitched and shivered, and nightmare mouths opened in anticipation.
Janer sat up, brushing embers from his hair. A black and red rain was falling about them, and smoke was belching up from the burning dingle below. He glanced across at Ambel who was still squatting by the Skinner’s hideaway, rubbing at his eyes.
‘What the hell was that?’ Janer asked.
The sounds of explosions had carried across the water, and they’d gaped up at the enormous ship hurtling towards them like a floating arcology, surrounded by energy displays, fast-moving objects and actinic explosions. Then: blinding greenish light, and fires and smoke all across the island, followed by an explosion that blew a cone of fire out of the bottom of the ship. The destroyer had then slid sideways and, trailing fire, slammed into the sea: a hot coal boiling into the depths.
‘Prador,’ muttered Ambel, blinking to clear the spots from his vision. ‘Don’t know what the Warden hit it with, but it was damned effective, I know that, lad.’
Janer took a shuddering breath, then raised his hand and opened it. Revealed was a single red crystal on a piece of cloth. Lucky he hadn’t lost it when he’d dived for cover. He looked round for the hexagonal box, took it up from where he had dropped it, and moved over to join Ambel. Setting the box on a nearby rock, he pressed a touch-plate on its side and a small door irised open at one end of it.