‘There is only a drone down there. A few of these Hoopers are not your responsibility. And these so-called Polity citizens, from what I have recently learnt, are nothing more than animated corpses.’
‘Nevertheless, I will be forced to employ a U-space weapon, should you fire. It will certainly destroy the projectile as it leaves the coil-gun, but I estimate it will also revolve half of your ship’s bulk into underspace then back out again, inverted.’
Almost to the microsecond of Sniper finishing the package, a torp streaked up out of the chaff cloud and exploded against his underside.
Where the fuck are you?
Sniper reserved his shots until he saw a clear target. He began motoring rapidly to the surface, with the pretence of drawing his attacker away from the chaff cloud. In reality he knew the cloud was a decoy to make him think the attacker was there. And after the Warden’s message he had no wish to hang around playing cat and mouse, especially as he seemed to have now taken on the mouse role. Some five hundred metres above the rising Prador ship he fired two missiles towards the cliff-side nearest to him, then focused his scanners below the tumbling rock fall that ensued.
Nothing.
He came up out of the trench, again trying to restart his S-cav drive. It came close to engaging, then the cone-field collapsed in a cascade of errors. He put this, and some of the weird readings he was getting on sonar, down to ultrasound damage. He began motoring to one side to get out of the way of the Prador ship. It was now elevated above the trench and sliding sideways, tonnes of rubble and silt pouring from it. Sniper decided he should head for the surface as fast as he could; at least in the air he would be able to use his fusion engine. Then something stopped him dead, as if he’d run into an invisible brick wall.
Invisible.
Sniper remembered the recording from SM12, just before that drone was destroyed. It had seemed the Prador war drone had moved off very quickly—because one moment it was there and the next moment gone.
‘Fuck,’ said Sniper, as a huge exotic metal claw folded out of nowhere and clamped on the forward edge of his shell. ‘Chameleonware.’
The Prador war drone appeared in one rippling wave, and Sniper immediately fired a contact torp directly towards it. The explosion blasted the two drones aside in a spinning course. The Prador drone’s exotic armour developed a glowing dent, but the shock wave, turning him against the gripping claw, bent Sniper’s armour where it was clamped. A square port opened in the bigger drone and now a torp slammed into Sniper, causing a similar dent. The big drone tried to bring its other claw to bear. Sniper wrapped two tentacles around it, and underwater arm wrestling ensued. Through another tentacle touching the base of that claw Sniper directed the discharge from one of his inner laminar batteries, but the instant he did that, a similar shock slammed into him through the other claw. They were hurtling towards the surface now, born their drives applied to the same task: the Prador drone to get a potential attacker away from its ship, Sniper because he did not want to be in the vicinity of an orbital strike. Despite the shock, however, Sniper still had another option.
‘Let’s see you hang on now,’ he sent.
He initiated his S-cav field, part of it intersecting the other drone, then opened his tractor drive to full power. Within seconds their speed doubled, and they continued accelerating. Some tightly focused ultrasound weapon began gnawing at Sniper’s armour just behind his head. Sniper injected aluminium-film chaff between, to soak up some of the energy. Then they exploded from the ocean’s surface. The field stuttered, went out, and Sniper engaged his fusion drive. That wrench was enough and, peeling away a piece of Sniper’s armour, the big drone tumbled away, snapped taut Sniper’s gripping tentacles, then fell again when the Polity drone released his hold. But, with a flash of white fire, the Prador engaged its own fusion engines and came on, now firing missiles and lasers.
Employing a hard-field, Sniper smacked the missiles out of the air, and replied with his APW. Violet fire splashed on his opponent’s hard-field, then it replied with its own APW blast. Sniper fired a missile which, exploding, caused a massive directional electromagnetic pulse. He was about to follow up with another APW blast, hopefully cutting through his opponent’s defences, which should have been knocked out by the pulse, when the two missiles he had knocked away earlier tried to hit him from the ocean below, where they had been waiting for this. One he shot down with a laser, but the other exploded just underneath him, delivering a similarly disabling EM pulse.
Not such a pushover, thought Sniper.
Reaching then exceeding the speed of sound, the two opponents hurtled over the ocean, leaving a trail of ionized gas, smoke and falling flakes of white-hot armour.
The coil-gun on the Prador ship was charged and ready to fire, and the Warden had no way of stopping it other than by firing on Vrost’s ship with conventional weapons—thus revealing a lack of anything else effective—or by further bluffing.
‘The seven-hundred-year-old drone is now no longer in the way,’ Vrost informed him.
Sniper’s departure from the scene had been all too evident, and the Warden supposed that the old drone was probably about as happy as he could ever be.
‘That still does not negate my original assertion. Vrell’s ship is now much closer to the Sable Keech and the two Hooper ships, and should you fire, the deaths of those aboard the three vessels would be certain,’ said the Warden calmly.
With another part of itself, the AI observed one of the armoured Prador as it drifted close to one of many orbital eyes, for it was not often that one of this kind got so close to Polity scanning equipment, and such an opportunity should not be missed.
Certainly, if the King’s household was organized along the same lines as others of his kind, all his guards would be first-, second- and third-children. There were no fourth-children, as any that survived the ruthless selection process in a Prador brood cave was automatically designated a third-child. The casualty rate being approximately 90 per cent for each generation, out of a thousand Prador nymphs in a brood only a hundred would survive the savage selection process so as to become third-children, while ten would survive to become second-children, and one would get to be a first-child. What this ensured was self-evident, for in the lifetime of an adult Prador, which could be as long as eight hundred solstan years, three to four hundred broods would be engendered. However, first-children rarely made it to adulthood since they were generally killed by their father around their fiftieth year of life, before they could make that final step. This meant that, at any one time, a single adult Prador should have a maximum of twenty-five first-children attending on it. Speculation in the Polity had always been rife about King Oboron and his guard, since the King was older than any other known Prador, with his first-children numbered in the thousands, and all of them wearing that concealing armour.
‘Again,’ Vrost replied, ‘Hoopers are not your concern, and the passengers of that ship are already dead.’
‘I must warn you I cannot allow you to use that coil-gun,’ said the Warden, groping around for something more to add. ‘And I must also ask whether this behaviour is what passes for diplomatic relations amongst your kind. Would your King be pleased with your actions here—and the way you are threatening the new alliance between the Polity and the Third Kingdom?’
Vrost was a long time in replying, and during this delay the Warden attempted some gentle probing of the armoured Prador.