‘Okay, you lot,’ Sniper addressed them. ‘Keep searching for that Golem. I’ll get back to you.’
‘Yes, Sniper,’ they all replied at once.
‘Eleven, Twelve, you’re with me,’ Sniper then sent.
SM12 had been the Warden’s lieutenant during that crucial battle a decade earlier, and though being physically destroyed, had yet managed to upload from its cockleshell drone body. When Sniper displaced the Warden he did not subsume the surviving SMs, but allowed them to choose their own course. Twelve opted for a new body much like its previous one, but a scallop shell this time, two metres across. Eleven, having missed all the action while acting as a signal-relay station, decided on a drone shell made in the mythical dolphin shape more commonly seen as a door knocker than in any ocean, but one two metres long. Both of them were armed with needle rail-guns and lasers, both of them possessed fusion boosters, and both of them had loaded a slightly adjusted version of ‘attitude’.
Sniper turned in mid-air, watching the drones approach. Twelve had opened his shell to fold out two boosters, and was hammering towards him rearwards. Eleven’s booster was positioned with anatomical humour. Sniper transmitted coordinates to them, then accelerated, and the drones adjusted their course to match his.
‘Problem, boss?’ asked Eleven.
‘Seems the Vignette might have burned and sunk,’ said Sniper.
‘Could we be the cause?’ asked Twelve. ‘That Captain did seem to resent us, and his crew weren’t in any hurry to cut him down.’
‘Maybe we were the catalyst,’ Sniper allowed. ‘That’s what we’ll find out.’
As they hurtled across the sky, Sniper transmitted to them all that the Warden had sent him.
‘Underneath thick cloud,’ Twelve mused. ‘It would be interesting to find out how many other ships have been in a similar position recently.’
‘I did check,’ said Sniper.
‘How many?’ asked Eleven.
‘None,’ Sniper replied.
Within an hour they were hovering over the sea twenty kilometres east of the last known coordinates of the Vignette. The cloud was dispersed now, and the sun a watery green eye above them.
‘Why here?’ asked Eleven.
‘The bottom’s two kilometres down and the current easterly,’ Sniper said. ‘The ship ain’t going to be directly below where it sank. Can you both pressure seal?’
‘Can do,’ said Eleven.
‘It was how I was designed before, and how I am designed now,’ said Twelve.
The three of them dropped towards the waves.
‘We’ll use U-space com. Stay alert, and keep all your detectors at maximum range,’ Sniper ordered, just as all three of them splashed down.
They stabbed into the sea, punching white-water trails like icicles, then allowed themselves to drift and sink with the current. Sniper scanned the other two, to witness Twelve retracting its boosters, and Eleven becoming stone rigid. Both of them would be filling their interstices with crash foam and adjusting other internal structures to withstand the pressure. The old war drone himself briefly tested his underwater tractor drive, and left his ports open to the water. He was itching for an excuse to use his supercavitation field, but supposed reluctantly that travelling at mach three underwater would not help him find the Vignette any quicker. He also opened his various weapons ports, to prevent sudden pressure inclusions should he need to shoot anything. Opening a port, with normal air pressure inside, to sea water under high pressure, was not a good idea, especially if you were in the process of trying to rapidly launch a mini torpedo. Also, the tractor drive needed its internal pressures equalized to its environment in order to function quickly and efficiently. But this was all the preparation he needed. Most of his new body was as dense as iron with very few air spaces, and his shell could take a great deal more than the water pressure he would find two kilometres down.
As the three drones descended through clear water, leeches, streaming towards them like shoals of flat eels, grated mouthparts against their armour then dropped away. When a leech the size of a small ship started to show an interest, Sniper brought to bear a device he had been anxious to try out. Loosely based on the Prador water gun, this weapon ionized and field-accelerated a jet of superheated sea water. Sniper called it his dissuader.
‘Remember what the Warden said,’ Twelve warned him.
‘Like a few leeches less might be a problem?’
The leech came on. Underwater, its body was leaf-shaped and moved with slow undulations that swept it forward rapidly. It went for Sniper—the larger prey—its stem an extending metre-wide mouth, starting to bell out to encompass him whole. Sniper fired, and it was as if a bar of hot metal stabbed out between himself and the leech, super-heated steam exploding in enormous bubbles away from it. Where it struck, the creature’s flesh just melted away in dark clouds, retreating like butter before a blow torch.
‘An effective weapon,’ commented Twelve.
‘Now that’s gotta smart!’ exclaimed Eleven.
The leech coiled in on itself, globular, and began to ascend in a mass of bubbles. The three continued down.
Deeper, and leeches were now somnolent strands drifting in the water. Glisters swam here, but never too close. A shoal of boxies turned away with geometric precision, and a small heirodont flicked its vertical sharkish tail and swept past with its mandibles clattering. Distantly came the moan of one of its larger cousins. The water was murky now, but Sniper soon discerned a mountain range below them. They swept the bottom with refined sonar beams, looking for sign of the ship. Sniper identified slopes of shell scree, and some intact empty shells so large he could have motored inside them.
‘I’ll do a wide scan over this grid. You two search one of the squares starting here,’ he sent. The drones’ method of underwater locomotion consisted of squid jets, so they would not be able to keep up even with just his tractor drive.
‘No need,’ said Eleven, broadcasting coordinates to his two companions.
They scanned down where he indicated, found the broken mast lying on one peak, then tracked a half-kilometre slide mark down the mountainside to where lay the ship in two halves.
‘Try to find its crew—they might still be alive,’ sent Sniper.
Hoopers, he knew, might survive even this.
The two little drones circled the two separate halves of the vessel, then entered one half each. Sniper held back, mapping the wreckage and building three-D models in his cortex. There, he brought the two halves together, correcting for damage obviously caused by it striking the underwater mountain and its long slide down here. It took him only moments to discern that something had exploded inside it.
‘No one here,’ said Twelve.
‘Not a single one,’ added Eleven.
Sniper closed in on one half, centering himself over where the explosion had occurred. He reached out with a tentacle and picked up one charred pearwood beam, then ran another tentacle over its burnt surface. The dense sea water all around prevented him using his laser spectrometer, so he drew in a small sample through a microtube, up through his tentacle and inside himself to analyse in his internal spectrometer. He removed from the results the signature for carbonized pearwood, then for burnt sea-gourd resin, leech and turbul ichor, and anything else commonly found on Hooper ships. Soon he had fined down the results to certain elements in certain proportions. Some kind of explosive, but this told him nothing he had not already guessed. He tried another sample at a different location, while Eleven and Twelve searched the surrounding area for any stripped fish. His fifth try revealed a definite spike for an uncommon element. It was one of the exotic metals; one of those discovered by humans only after they had left the solar system, but which another race had discovered long before. Sniper recognized it instantly—enough of it having been shot at him over the years.