Of course the newer Polity battleships did carry such weapons: USERs and DUSERs being respectively general underspace interference emitters, and the directed kind which could cause a U-space drive to detonate; the various DIGRAWs—directed gravity weapons—which if they did not instantly shred their target, would occlude any antimatter vessels that same target contained with the same result, besides other devices bearing numerous other acronyms. AIs were reluctant to employ them in battle, as the difference between what the Warden labelled conventional weapons and those devices was the difference between a machine gun and an ICBM. However, the Prador must have some knowledge of them, since bad news like that is not easily concealed.
After a long delay the Prador captain asked, ‘What do you suggest?’
Still accelerating away, Sniper saw first the underwater flash, then what looked like a fast-moving and immense aquarium glass hurrying to catch him up. He withdrew his tentacles and head, and closed and sealed his composite clypeus. The pressure wave hit him, travelling at Mach 3. His cavitating field went out, and the drive sputtered to a stop shortly after. Those senses of his relying on sound were soon providing no useful information at all, and his other senses could probe no distance into the grey chaos. But in a U-space transmission he picked up Eleven’s brief ‘Oh shit’ as that submind—at the moment of its fish-shell destruction—transmitted itself to the Warden. Sniper was unsurprised: Eleven’s shell had not been as rugged as his own, and he himself was getting a battering.
Sniper’s structure distorted and components broken inside him. He noted high-pressure water forcing its way inside him through a breach in the tractor drive and tried closing its ports, but it was like trying to shut them on stone. Then the pressure wave passed on. He flipped down his clypeus, extruded his head and tentacles, and saw he was tumbling through hot clear water above a stratum of silty chaos. Activating his tractor drive and stabilizing himself with his tentacles, he watched the silt boil to a halt in its direction of flow, and all sorts of strange objects begin to float up out of it. There the carapace of a large prill, devoid of legs and bubbling hot internal gases, and there the separate carapace segments of glisters, red as cooked lobsters, and the strandy glutinous masses that were all that remained of leeches. Then something dropped past him from above and it took him a moment to identify the completely intact skeleton of a heirodont, boiled clean of flesh.
‘Well, if it’s fucking war they want,’ he sent.
‘It is not war,’ the Warden replied. ‘But it seems they very much don’t want Vrell leaving here alive.’
‘Seems a bit drastic just for one post-adolescent Prador,’ Sniper opined.
‘Yes, it does—and that’s interesting.’
Sniper began motoring towards the surface. ‘Did they hit him?’
‘Not as far as I can gather.’
Sniper broke through the surface into a hurricane raging below the weirdest sky he had seen in a long time. A low ceiling of grey cloud stretched from horizon to horizon, but wherever it broke he observed the rainbow aurora of high-atmosphere ionization.
The Warden continued, ‘That was in the nature of a little nudge to drive him from cover. At present no further such nudges will be forthcoming, so I suggest you find Ebulan’s ship before our friend up here gets impatient again.’
Sniper located himself on his internal map by signals from one of the Warden’s satellites, and realized the pressure wave had carried him eighty kilometres.
‘Okay, send me a copy of Twelve’s last ten minutes. That drone he detected was probably heading straight back to Vrell.’
The package arrived within a second, but it took a minute for Sniper to delete everything irrelevant: including the drone’s boredom with the task in hand, a program it was running concerning the historical significance of seashells, and how it really didn’t want to get splattered when so close to buying emancipation. The residue fined down to Twelve’s exact position when it had detected the Prador drone, that drone’s then position, and its general course before it spotted Twelve. Sniper aligned that same course on his internal map, and saw that continuing it in a straight line brought it to a point on the Lamarck Trench five hundred kilometres from where he was. He tried to start his supercavitating field, but it was then that a swarm of error messages called attention to themselves.
‘Fuckit, fuckit, fuckit!’ Sniper repeated as, on tractor drive only, he headed slowly to that identified location, while shifting internal micro-welding heads to repair the breaches in the S-cav field generator.
As fast as possible, Vrell put his blanks on hold, clinging to the nearest supports and holding onto any breakable items. He shut down all internal systems that could be disrupted by a shock, isolated fusion reactors, and closed all the workable internal doors. The drone made it back inside just in time, and Vrell rapidly closed the cache door behind it. Then he himself clattered over to one side and clung to the uneven wall of the sanctum. The underwater blast wave slammed into the ship, lifting it up off the bottom so the concealing layer covering its upper hull slid away, and grinding it down nose first a few hundred metres along the bottom of the trench. Then the ship settled in a roiling cloud of silt. Debris falling through the water—boiled and broken creatures, boulders torn free from above and the silt itself—would soon conceal him again. But perhaps the time for concealment of that kind had ended.
Vrell absorbed the download from his drone. It had been spotted by one of the Warden’s drones, but had destroyed that observer just before the blast. But the Warden would now know this ship was close, and so might detect it at any moment. Vrell listened again to the transmissions he had decoded between the Warden and the Prador warship. If Vrell’s ship was detected down here, how long before the Prador captain fired a kinetic missile directly on target? Admittedly the captain had not yet recognized the Warden’s double bluff, for it was fabricated upon the way this very ship had first been brought down. Vrell knew this had been effected by subversion of thrall codes, distracting Ebulan sufficiently for that old war drone to slam both itself and a dead Prador drone down on top of the ship from high atmosphere, with an impact not dissimilar to that of the recently fired kinetic missile. No U-space or gravtech weapons had been deployed—the Warden possessed none. However, Vrell thought it likely that the Prador captain had actually ceased firing because he did not want to cause an incident, and the fifty or so kinetic missiles he might need to work along the entire length of the trench would certainly do that. Just one missile though…
Vrell then considered why the captain had fired at all. Obviously the Prador King knew what the Spatterjay virus could turn other Prador into, and suspected that Vrell, having survived so long on this planet, might also be infected. The King certainly did not want that kind of competition, nor for anyone but himself and his immediate offspring to enjoy the same advantage.
‘What do I do with this?’ asked the drone from down in its cache.
Vrell came sharply out of his reverie, to look through his brother’s eyes, and through those others’ eyes down below. The drone was holding part of a segmented life form in its claws. Though one end of it was ragged, as if part of it had been torn away, it was still writhing furiously. Vrell picked up the uncoded thrall carrier signals issuing from it and, as he magnetometer-scanned it, realized there was a spider thrall lodged in each of its segments. It was then easy for him to read the carrier signal and program it into the control unit previously employed to run the radioactive blank ejected earlier. This certainly could be no setup instituted by Prador, for they were utterly aware of the interchangeability of control unit and thrall. For if you did not sufficiently encrypt signals to and from a thrall, an enemy might use it to control you instead. This had happened regularly in the Third Kingdom and, adult Prador being even less friendly to each other than to different species, the result was usually extremely painful, messy, and then terminal.