‘Captain Ambel!’ said one of them delightedly. He was a thin-set lad with blond hair tied in a pony tail. The other one was of squatter build, his ginger hair patchy on the dome of his head. Another few years and it would likely all be gone—just like Ron’s.
‘Do I know you?’ the Captain asked.
‘I’m Silister, and my friend is Davy-bronte… from the Vignette.’
‘Ah…’ said Ambel. ‘Well get aboard sharpish and you can tell me all about it.’
The two men scrambled up the rope ladder Peck had cast down to them. Ambel observed chunks taken out of the side of their craft, some burns, and the remains of a rhinoworm on which the two had obviously been dining. The boat was also partially awash. He nodded to himself—they had been adrift for a while and survived, doubtless with some Polity assistance. As soon as the two men were on deck and standing before Ambel, he shouted up to Galegrabber, ‘Let’s be moving along then!’ The sail seemed intent on something out at sea, so he yelled. ‘Galegrabber!’ Eventually it obeyed and, under the boom of fabric sail, the Treader journeyed on.
‘What about the boat?’ Peck was peering over the side.
‘Tie her off at the stern,’ Ambel replied.
Muttering imprecations Peck took up a coil of rope and climbed over the rail.
‘All right, lads, which of you has the laser?’
The two of them looked uncomfortable. Eventually the squat one, Davy-bronte, opened his shirt and pulled out a QC laser handgun. He hesitated for a moment, then turned it round so as to present the butt to Ambel. The Captain took the weapon, inspected it for a moment, then handed it back to him. The look of surprise on Davy-bronte’s face both amused and saddened him.
‘This isn’t the Vignette. It’s your weapon, so you keep it. I just want to know who has it so I know who to call on should it be necessary.’ He pointed up to the bridge. ‘Anne up there’s got a laser carbine. And that over there is mine.’ He pointed to where his blunderbuss hung. ‘Now, speaking of the Vignette, where exactly is that ship now?’
After a long hesitation, the one called Davy-bronte replied, ‘A couple of kilometres down, I reckon.’
Ambel winced. He might not have much time for Orbus, but no Captain liked to hear about a ship going down. The best that could be hoped for crew from a stricken ship who ended up in the water was that something big might grab and kill them quickly, since only very young Hoopers would have the luxury of drowning. Ambel knew, only too well, what happened to older Hoopers left helpless in the sea.
‘Why’s that then, lad?’
‘A big Prador war drone shot a hole through the side.’
Coming over the rail with the end of the rope, the other end of which he had just attached to the boat, Peck said, ‘Chewin’ bloody squeaky weed bugger.’ He then headed for the stern, flipping the slack along the rail as he went, while the rowing boat drifted out behind the ship.
Ambel ignored his muttering. ‘Prador war drone?’
Silister now replied, ‘It come out of the sea. The Cap’n thought it was that other big Polity drone at first an’ it harpooned him, then it rained sail meat an’ it got Drooble first…’ He trailed off, looking confused, then brightly added, ‘We were caulking the boat. We hid.’
Ambel patted him on the shoulder. ‘Perhaps you’d better start—’
‘Aaargh!’
Ambel stepped past them and hurried to the stern, in time to see Peck leaning back hard, his feet slipping along the deck, the rope now a taut line to the stern rail, then out to the boat beyond. Ambel stepped to the rail and saw the boat, half sunk, waggling from side to side.
‘Let it go, Peck.’
‘Umph.’
The line slackened. The boat turned a circle, lifted up out of the water and fell back upside down. A familiar flat white tentacle rose behind it, then came down hard, smashing it to matchwood.
‘We got all the sail on?’ Ambel asked loudly but casually.
‘Yes, Captain!’ shouted Boris. He was also turning the Treader quickly, so it would run with the wind.
‘What?’ asked Silister, who had followed with his companion.
‘One thing at a time,’ said Ambel. ‘Now tell me again what happened to the Vignette.’
The giant whelk chewed on the fragments of wood, sucking every nuance of flavour from them. She located and gobbled up the slightly rancid chunk of rhinoworm. She was very hungry, having discovered that swimming used up more energy than crawling along the bottom, but all this unaccustomed activity also made her feel more alive than ever before. Also, such were the changes she had undergone, mentally and physically, she was beginning to question her earlier motivations of revenge.
The bulk of her young had been eaten by a shoal of turbul, but should she ever encounter any of that species again she would treat them no differently than before. She would kill and eat them just the same. The human… yes the word was now clear in her mind… had only killed one of her young, and she was not exactly pursuing that particular human, but any with some connection to it. No matter. She gave an underwater shrug. She would kill and eat them just the same. That was what she did. Anyway, she was enjoying this chase. It was with a growth of something new inside her—humour—that she recognized that she killed and ate any living thing she could lay her tentacles on. And so she laboured on after the Treader.
The heirodont, closing in from five hundred metres behind her, possessed no sense of humour at all, probably because it spent most of its life being fed upon by parasitic leeches. However, it did enjoy a chase, and it definitely ascribed to the same creed as the whelk: it killed and ate anything it could get its mandibles around.
11
Sea Leech:
upon entering the ocean, the leech’s body-shape becomes leaflike to more suit it to the pelagic life. It grows huge on a diet of flesh taken from boxies, turbul, oceanic heirodonts—anything soft enough for it to bore into with its plug-extracting mouth. By the time a sea leech becomes whale-sized, such prey is too small to provide sufficient nutrient by plug feeding. However, it would be dangerous for the leech to take prey down whole as, with the incredible durability and voracity of all Spatterjay’s fauna, that prey would eat the leech from the inside. Hunger drives the next transformation. The leech grows a sprine-producing bile duct and feeds upon whole prey—poisoning them with sprine inside its intestines. Again genetically programmed to respond to their environment, they mate only when the surrounding population of their own kind drops below a certain level (this measured by the quantity of particular pheromones in the water). Leeches are hermaphrodite: they will close against another of their kind and exchange genetic material. After this the leech dies during the process of attaching its own body-segments to the bottom of masses of floating sargassum. The segments then collapse into hard encystments, and the cells inside them turn into eggs encased in sprine jelly. Each of these hatches a diatom, which then begins its long journey to shore to become a land leech —
In his stateroom. Bloc sat on the edge of his wide, soft and unneeded bed and stared at the polished, oak-panelled wall—an occupation that seemed more and more frequent to him lately. Internally, he gazed into the red tunnel comprising the third channel from his control unit. He felt that what he barely controlled there was his only option now. Ellanc Strone and those aligned with him had not needed to come on this voyage, but they had, and now their earlier complaining was turning into open defiance. Bloc realized that Strone understood Bloc’s position here; that he was isolated and could possibly be usurped. Could it be that the other reif was secretly working for Lineworld? No matter, Bloc must quickly assert full control aboard this ship, and remove all dangers to himself and this enterprise. As if to illustrate, the reason for this now appeared on his internal visual display: