Settled in the room of her demesne especially reserved for Prador visitors, the woman and Ebulan exchanged pleasantries for as long as it took Ebulan to have his blanks check out the whole area and position themselves. Once he was satisfied a rival had not predicted the visit, and no traps were laid, Ebulan settled down on his AG units.
‘Something has occurred,’ said Ebulan through the speaker.
‘Please tell me,’ said the woman.
‘The reification has returned, at last, to Spatterjay.’
The woman sat very still as a thousand memories shrieked for attention. She felt a brief nausea as her central core went into nerve conflict with the body she had stolen.
‘Does this not interest you, Rebecca?’ asked the councillor,
Rebecca Frisk turned and gazed out of the crystal windows towards the salt flats. Keech — always damned Keech. Even after sending her own body, fitted with the brain and spinal column that had been in this current body, to ECS, she could not be safe while he… existed.
‘He’s still alive,’ she stated.
‘I wonder who you mean,’ said Ebulan.
Frisk glared at him. ‘I mean Keech.’
‘Problematical,’ said Ebulan. He shifted on his AG units as if uncomfortable.
Frisk ignored that and stared out of the window again. ‘Eight contracts and a hundred subcontracts from them, and every one a failure. Two of them were taken up by Batian stone killers. That bastard almost found out about me when he smeared them,’ she said. She turned to Ebulan. ‘Does he know about Jay?’
‘This I was not able to determine.’
‘He will.’
5
Having the ability to taste one part in a million of fresh ichor in the water, also possessing the thickest armour and the most efficacious mouthparts of any of the marine predators there, glisters were rapacious predators and assiduous scavengers. The four — a female and fertilizing males one to three — descended from their slimy home underneath a clump of decaying sargassum, and with tails flicking and flat legs extended as stabilizers, homed in on the delicious taste of dead or dying whelks, and that slightly hormonal hint of turbul in a feeding frenzy — that time in which the big fish became rather careless. The ever-spreading cloud of broken shell, fragments of flesh and essential juices, had lured to its perimeter a shoal of boxies, which fed with frenetic determination and a careful eye on the surrounding depths. As the glisters closed, the boxies fled, but the great crustaceans weren’t interested in giving chase to them. Instead, they ground and chattered their mouthparts while contemplating the long meaty bodies of turbul rolling and feeding on whelks — still oblivious to their surroundings. Leeches now were also homing in to latch on to turbul for a moment, then ooze away with a bleeding prize, and even prill were descending from above like flying saucers with particularly vicious landing gear. And the glisters knew they would have to be quick, before their potential banquet became a dispersed cloud of floating canapés.
‘Atoll GCV 1232, beginning census scan,’ said SM13.
‘You only say that to irritate me,’ said Sniper, as they hovered above an atoll like a huge apple core thrust down into the sea.
‘The Warden’s right, you know,’ said the iron seahorse drone. ‘You’re getting cranky in your old age.’
‘And you think counting snails is a worthwhile pastime?’
‘No, but it’s amazing what interesting items you can find out here and what they’ll fetch in the auctions on Coram, and it beats subsumption every time,’ replied Thirteen.
‘I don’t have to be wary of that. I’m a freed drone. I worked off my construction fees and indenture centuries ago. If I want to become part of the Warden, I can. I don’t want to, yet.’
‘Planting stealth mines on Prador dropbirds was how you paid your way out, as I recollect. You consider that a worthwhile pastime? Some of us are not so inclined to the martial occupation. Perhaps you should try subsumption at least once, it’d straighten out a few of your kinks.’
‘I’ve got kinks?’ Sniper paused for a moment. ‘What interesting items?’
‘Amberclam pearls, fossilized glister shell. I even found a vein of green sapphire once,’ replied Thirteen.
‘You never told me about this before,’ said Sniper.
‘Well, after the trouble I got into through snatching thrall units for you, I thought it best to keep quiet for a while.’
After a contemplative silence Sniper said, without heat, ‘We gonna count these fucking snails or what?’
The little drone turned towards Sniper with light glinting in its amber eyes, then it turned its nose and tilted it in the direction of one side of the atoll.
‘I’ll go this way round and you go the other. We’ll meet on the other side. This is the last one in sector fifty-two, then we can move on to fifty-three, which should be more interesting. There’s molly carp there.’
‘Oh joyful day,’ said Sniper. ‘You know why the Warden wants this census?’
‘The way I got it was “A study to assess the long-term impact of runcible heat pollution and on which to base any future plans for environmental restructuring”.’
‘Make-work,’ said Sniper, drifting down to the surface of the sea and lowering his back two legs into the water. The scanning probes in his feet now operating, he slowly began to trawl around the atoll. A subprogram he was running, now counted hammer whelks and catalogued them according to size and species. Sniper then ran one of his military programs to work out the minimum size of charge required to smash certain shells and kill their occupants. He did not test his theories until SMI3 was out of sight. The trail of small underwater explosions the war drone left behind him was also undetectable. Five hours later, the two drones met on the other side of the atoll.
‘You know, I don’t get why you came here to work with the Warden,’ said Thirteen, as they cruised on to pastures new.
‘Easy enough. I wanted to spend time on a Line world like this: more chance of some sort of action. Nothing’s got out of hand in the Polity for a long time now, and things are boringly peaceful. The few Separatist actions are normally flattened by ECS agents before there’s any need to deploy war drones.’
Below them the water was the colour of jade, fractured by the occasional white wake from some cruising sea leviathan. The sky was a lighter green shading to blue, and steel-grey clouds held the setting sun as if in a broken pewter vessel. Sniper remembered a day when, above seas very like this, he had been engaged in hunting down two inferior Prador war drones. They had been of old utile design: just flattened spheres of armour wrapped around an AG unit, a mind, and magazines for the antipersonnel guns they had welded underneath. Such was the way of things: when a technology had been taken to its limit of efficiency and utility, you could make it look pretty. This flying brooch next to him was definitely one of the latest examples of that. But those Prador war drones had not reached that point.
Still with a feeling of satisfaction, Sniper remembered catching both Prador drones against the cliff face where they had been hiding. He had spent an hour carefully herding them until he could take them both out with one high-penetration missile. Of course, no one but himself had appreciated the poetry of that moment. The humans and big-fuck AIs running the clean-up operation had posited it as yet another example of Sniper’s flagrant individualism during organized conflict. Sniper had always been the odd one out — from when his mind had been incepted by a dying AI warship, up to and including his choice of a body-shape that scared the shit out of most humans.
‘You’re ugly inside and out, AI,’ said a man who had been passing information to the Prador, just before Sniper had snipped his head off.
‘Remembering the good old days?’ said Thirteen.
‘Yeah,’ said Sniper, and then began to hum a tune.
‘What’s that?’ asked Thirteen.
‘“Ugly Duckling”,’ said Sniper then, gesturing ahead with its heavy claw, continued, ‘That one ain’t on the map.’