‘How did you know all this?’ Erlin gazed at Ron, Wade and Janer in turn.
Janer shrugged. ‘I didn’t.’
‘Styx broke into the ship’s concealed plan a while ago,’ said Ron. ‘It’s just the control codes we’ve been after, since.’
‘And this will pull us free?’ Erlin glanced back at the boiling sea.
‘If we don’t run out of power first,’ replied Ron, watching the lasers turn more of the walking rhinoworms into macaroni.
The trench was now right below Sniper and slowly the error messages from his S-cav drive were blinking out. He descended a cliff that sprouted seaweed trees in the branches of which shoals of boxies swam like mobile silver apples. Passing a deep cave, he observed two large eyes watching him, and an ultrasound scan rendered him the strange image of something like a giant whelk, sans shell, protecting its softer body in stone like some kind of hermit crab. Finally reaching the bottom, he scanned at full power with each of his senses, then again picked up something in ultraviolet.
Prador were riddled with tactical blind spots—it was this that had once enabled Sniper to defeat a number of Ebulan’s drones, even though they carried superior firepower and armour—and he suspected this was how he would now find the hidden spaceship. Doubtless Vrell had concealed it in a deeper part of the trench, but what the Prador had failed to conceal were the leaking radioactives, which were thick in the water here. Choosing the direction from which the current seemed to be sweeping the isotopes, he headed off. Then, ahead of him, against the base of a rocky underwater cliff, he spotted the painfully bright glare of some large pill-shaped metallic object.
Sniper scanned his find briefly, quickly realizing it was a dumped fusion reactor—its casing cracked and the isotope ash of its last faulty burn poisoning both itself and now its surroundings. Around this object the bottom was littered with dead and dying creatures: some small varieties of whelk and bleached-white heirodonts no bigger than a human arm. Checking his records the drone realized these were creatures whose vision extended into the ultraviolet. They had been attracted by the light—and it had killed them.
‘Fuckit,’ Sniper muttered, moving on.
The reactor could have been dumped during the journey along the trench, so the ship itself could be many kilometres from here. Almost with a sigh, Sniper transmitted his findings to the Warden, then continued trundling along just above the bottom.
The AI on Spatterjay’s moon responded immediately. ‘You must find that ship soon. The Prador captain is becoming impatient. His drones and his armoured Prador have dropped to the stratosphere, and I don’t think they will hold there for long.’
‘This could be a good sign,’ said Sniper. ‘If Vrell had considered the possibility of this reactor being found, he’d have concealed it better. It could be that it was only carried a minimal distance from the ship itself, and then dumped.’
He now reached the base of a rubble slope in the trench. The remaining error messages in his S-cav drive now merely concerned his jammed ports. This meant weaknesses in his armour, but did not mean the drive itself would not work.
‘That is a possibility arising from optimism rather than logic,’ opined the Warden huffily.
Sniper sent back a U-space raspberry and continued searching.
Halfway up the slope the drone spotted a small shoal of those heirodonts encountered earlier near the reactor. The water was disturbed and murky around them as they fed upon something. Admitting the possibility of finding another human corpse, though by the readings in ultraviolet not a radioactive one, Sniper motored over.
The heirodonts dispersed, then circled round again—loath to leave their meal. Revealed was an adult frog whelk, much the size of Sniper himself, its shell crushed under the edge of a large slab of rock. What remained of its extended foot still moved weakly, but its eyes were gone and what he could see of its main body, inside the broken shell, was in tatters. Even while he watched, more of those same heirodonts fled from cracks in the whelk’s shell. The creatures would not have been able to feed on the whelk in any other circumstance. He suspected that having most of its main body eaten had weakened it sufficiently for them to go to work on its tough appendage.
But there was nothing else important for him here.
Sniper noted another shoal now coming down towards him. That whelk would not last much longer—would never get the chance to regenerate as did so many of the animals here. Then it hit him: why was the whelk trapped underneath this slab? This slope of rubble must be a recent fall—but what had caused it? Yes, probably the shock wave, but maybe something else. Suddenly back on alert, Sniper opened his scan all around him. The moment it touched the descending shoal, that shoal accelerated. These fish were not flesh—they were black and too evenly shaped—and no creature down here propelled itself by a constant water jet.
Sniper spun upright, put his S-cav drive online, and accelerated upwards in an explosion of silt which disappeared amidst more silt rising, as the very ocean began to shake. Explosions nearby knocked out the cone-field of his drive, and set him tumbling for a moment. He saw further explosions below turning the whelk into mincemeat and slivers of shell. The remainder of the swarm of mini-torpedoes now swerved towards him.
‘Found it!’ he sent over U-space.
Below him an avalanche revealed a rising curved edge of metal, and the constant blast along the trench from some massive turbine.
‘Get out of there, Sniper,’ the Warden replied. ‘I’ve so far dissuaded our friend from using his coil-gun, but as soon as he knows about this, I suspect he’ll change his mind.’
‘That’s my—’
An explosion right next to him again knocked out Sniper’s cone-field, even as he began to generate it. He scanned for other missiles, could see nothing, then whipped a tentacle through the dispersing cloud of the explosion and drew in, through microtubes, a sample for his internal spectrometer.
Ceramic missiles?
Suddenly every moving object around him could prove a threat—missiles fired at him did not have to be metallic. He blew out a cloud of antimunitions beads and motored sideways, scanning behind and below for the precise source of the attack, which had to have originated from somewhere on the rising titanic spaceship now filling the trench from side to side. However, the focused ultrasound pulses hit him from above. They struck the end of one of his large tentacles and tracked in, paralysing that limb then scrambling some of his internal systems when they reached his main body. He loaded and fired hunting torps upwards directly towards the triangulated source, which was behind a spreading cloud of mercury chaff. The source then speared into view, launching another ultrasound pulse. It was another torpedo.
Sniper veered, angling his course upwards at forty-five degrees away from some rising monolithic extension of the Prador ship. Rerouting internal systems knocked out by ultrasound attack, he made for the edge of the chaff cloud, as his attacker was almost certainly behind it. After firing a couple of torps towards the further edge of the cloud, these missiles being programmed to go around it and intercept whatever they found there, he loaded antimunitions. Rounding the cloud, he opened up with his own ultrasound weapon. He hit one of his own seeking torps and it blew in a flat explosion. The other one kept circling, sniffing for prey that was not here. Just then, rather than communicate, the Warden relayed a recent exchange, compressed to be read at high speed directly into Sniper’s mind:
‘If you fire now, you will be destroying a seven-hundred-year-old Polity citizen and ECS employee. You will also kill the crews of two Hooper ships, the Polity passengers and Hooper crew of another larger vessel—and cause untold environmental damage.’