‘Why wasn’t the sprine killing the head too?’ he asked.
‘Had never fully connected itself. I wounded the body,’ said Ambel, still relentlessly pulling away rock. Janer watched him a while longer, then removed his own backpack, extracting from it the hexagonal box. He couldn’t help feeling a certain inevitability about this moment.
‘I have a way we can kill it,’ he said. ‘All I need is a crystal of sprine.’
‘At last,’ breathed the Hive mind.
Ebulan reached out with rigid control, and Pilot touched and manipulated the various complex controls to start AG and warm the thrusters. Through another blank, the Prador put the weapons console online and checked the loads. All readings were optimum. The rear nacelles contained a hundred and forty-four missiles fitted with CTDs, as well as cluster and planar explosives. There were four defence lasers and two giga-joule particle beams. Even the old rail-guns were in perfect order, and had carousels full of ceramo-carbide missiles that could be fired at half the speed of light.
Meanwhile other blanks were running on the slave programs loaded into their thrall units, maintaining the ship, or standing ready to replace Pilot or the blank seated at the weapons console, all ready and equipped with hull patches and fire retardants, should the ship be hit.
The Prador destroyer rose out of the trench spilling an accumulation of silt and broken shell from its upper surfaces. It rose past heirodonts pausing in the depths for one brief respite in their painful lives, till finally it came up underneath an island of sargassum. As it rose it hauled up tonnes of seaweed with it, so that leeches and prill cascaded about it in organic rain. For a short while the hull matched the colour and texture of the floating mass of seaweed, then a line of fire traversed the ship, from its sensor arrays to its rear thrusters. Weed exploded from the armoured hull and fell flaming into the sea. Clouds of superheated steam were blasted away, then recondensed in an expanding cloud as the destroyer began to move. As it tilted, the sea below it flattened, then three evenly spaced thrusters blasted ribbed blue flames, and with a crash the destroyer accelerated into the sky.
Pilot moved a hand across the weapons console and slapped in a launch-and-seek program. A rear nacelle opened and three lines of fire sped away. Ebulan viewed them for just a moment then turned his attention to the detectors ranged before his own eyes and the eyes of his blanks. It hardly mattered if those departing missiles found their target; they were merely diversionary.
The Warden observed the path of the three missiles for a microsecond then sent a warning to the Dome.
‘Acknowledged,’ said the submind there, with a heavy emphasis. The Warden probed a little and discovered that the submind had been on to the missiles from the moment they were launched so had already been tracking them for at least a whole second. It ignored the mind’s sarcasm and, with that part of itself not tied up in trying to crack Prador code, it turned its attention elsewhere.
‘Twelve, take the SMs out from the island, to attack the Prador ship,’ it sent.
‘Yeah, let’s kick us some ass!’ returned one of them.
Two observed, ‘I note you say “attack” not “destroy”. You realize we’ll be lucky even to slow it down?’
‘If you can realize that then the Warden certainly can,’ said Twelve patiently.
The Warden watched the seven drones accelerate out from the island and fall into an arrow formation. It prepared itself to upload all the subminds, should — at the moment of their physical destruction — they even have time to transmit themselves. Through their eyes it watched the Prador destroyer come into view and with a little further probing, learnt that the enforcer drones were ready and willing for the fight, and that SM12, though ready to do what it could, felt certain it was about to become a metallic smear on the ocean surface.
‘We go in like this,’ explained Twelve, sending them details of an attack formation selected from its library. One, Two and Seven slid to the fore and spread to the three points of a triangle. The remaining drones spread to the corners of a square. Both shapes began revolving.
‘And the purpose of this?’ enquired Two.
‘We’ll present a dispersed and more difficult target,’ said Twelve. ‘We also have a better chance of firing past shield projectors, and intercepting lasers and rail-gun fusillades.’
‘In your arse,’ said a voice.
‘Who the…?’ began Twelve, but by then they were already on the Prador ship.
The drone formation slid over the destroyer like a tube. Lasers heated their casings on this pass, and they only managed half a second of fire. Their missiles needled down at the golden armour, most of them blasting against projected fields so that for half a second the destroyer was surrounded by coins of fire. Some missiles did get through to blow concentric ripples of flame around the hull of the ship. But where they struck, they left only glowing spots on its armour, and those spots quickly faded.
‘Loop round,’ said Twelve. ‘We’ll go in from the side this time.’
‘Yeah, and with that you’ll achieve what?’
‘Prador war drone approaching from the east!’ yelled Seven.
‘It was a Prador war drone, but now it’s me.’
‘Sniper, is that you?’ asked Twelve.
‘Isn’t that what I just said?’ replied Sniper.
The old war drone had now become an amalgam of dented Prador drone with a headless aluminium crayfish attached to its surface and linked to the inside, through the split, via a fountain of optic cables.
Sniper went on, ‘Dispersed and more difficult target, my arse. That Prador is playing with you. While it appears that you might be doing some damage, it knows there’s less chance of anything else being sent against it. Otherwise you’d all be scrap by now.’
‘What would you suggest?’ asked Twelve.
‘I don’t suggest. I’m telling you that a dispersed attack is going to do nothing to affect that armour. You need to go in randomly and concentrate on just one point. Go for something vulnerable: a sensor array or a thruster. Now do it!’
Twelve bowed to Sniper’s experience, and the formation broke as it hurtled back in towards the ship, the drones weaving all over the sky as lasers tried to pick up on them almost with a casual indifference.
‘Seven to Ten, concentrate everything you have on that port thruster,’ sent Sniper. ‘One and Two, once they hit it, you hit the port laser with your rail-guns. Twelve, you’ve only got a geological laser — so why the hell are you here?’
‘As a distraction?’ Twelve suggested.
‘Yeah, if you like,’ said Sniper.
‘Where are you going?’ Twelve asked, noticing that Sniper was receding into the sky.
‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back before you know it. Or, rather, back before our friend in that ship knows it.’
The SMs shot in over the destroyer and their missiles spread like a cloud of gnats around it. Everything seemed random until the cloud suddenly closed on the rear of the destroyer. A constant stuttering explosion bloomed, and the casing of a thruster went incandescent. The destroyer tilted as if a giant hand had slapped its back end — but then it quickly corrected. Shortly after that, there was a flash of purple fire, and an extrusion on the front of the Prador ship suddenly blackened and cracked open. Directly on top of that a luminous green line stabbed up from the destroyer and something danced before it, flickered, and became just a line of dust in the sky.
‘There went Seven,’ said Two.
‘Particle beam,’ observed Nine — then, ‘EM shells!’
Twelve flew over the top of the ship, through a wall of fire. It could do nothing: its little geological laser, had it even been working, could not have touched this Prador armour. As it passed through the fire, Twelve closed its cockle-shells and tumbled through the air, as the EM pulse knocked its AG controls out of sync. Correcting at the last moment, it noted the crash foam inside itself melting, and that the casing on its micro-pile was developing hairline cracks.