‘Keep us turning. Have we got full power to those engines?’
‘We have, Captain,’ replied the Hooper who was operating the controls.
‘Bugger.’ Ron was still peering at the Prador ship, now very much closer. It was turning as they turned, remaining right on target. He lowered the monocular, no longer needing it. Launched from one of the round turrets, missiles sped up into the sky and detonated high above. EM blast—had to be. He looked around and noted Styx stepping back from the coms console, whose lights and screen had just blinked out. Squinting back at the location of the recent blasts, he saw three objects dropping from the sky: two war drones and one armoured Prador, which he recognized even at this distance. With a bitter taste in his mouth he recollected sights very like this from the first century of his life.
Then, as if in no time at all, weapons turrets were passing on either side of the Sable Keech before slowing, and it was as if a thunderstorm had enveloped the ship. With a screaming crash, turquoise fire slashed up into the sky. Launchers spun on one of the turrets, releasing such a fusillade of missiles that they cut for the horizon in a seemingly solid black line. Something detonated nearby, scattering shrapnel across the ocean, and one large fragment skimmed over the water and into the ship’s side, with a low crump that shuddered through the deck. Then came a detonation above, and a wave of fire rolling across the sky. The ship dipped under the blast, throwing people off their feet. As a brief interval of quiet followed, Ron watched the turrets rising higher out of the sea, and heard that familiar grinding on the hull.
‘Shut off the engines,’ he calmly instructed. ‘We’ll only be going where this bastard wants to take us.’
He still called himself Vrell, no matter that his body was now made of metal and his brain was the flash-frozen tissue of a sibling. As he motored back underwater, towards his other self, his internal systems worked ceaselessly to repair the damage caused by the old Polity drone, and he refined deuterium oxide fuel from sea water for his fusion reactor, which in turn was charging up the depleted capacitors and laminar batteries powering his energy weapons. He was puzzled by his earlier actions, unable to fathom why he had not led his opponent within range of those weapons now devastating Vrost’s forces in the air above him. His action had been allowed because the order for him to return to the spaceship took precedence over the one for him to destroy the old drone, but that did not wholly account for his own decision. Perhaps the bitterness of knowing his own chances of surviving this were little above zero lay behind his decision to let the old drone live?
Black shapes again streaked past him through the water. Some of the other drones and members of the King’s guard had followed him into the sea, but they were no less at the mercy of the ship’s weapons than those above. Reddish explosions detonated behind him and, over com frequencies, he could hear the sound of something dying. Then came contact from the real Vrelclass="underline"
‘Two drones and one King’s guard have fallen into the sea here.’ Vrell sent coordinates. ‘All have been disabled by electromagnetic pulse. The guard’s fusion device has not detonated. Destroy the two drones and retrieve the guard.’
‘As you will.’
The Vrell drone obeyed—he could not do otherwise. However, he was still a copy of the original Vrell, and therefore not something loaded into a drone shell and programmed to military service from the moment he had hatched, so was capable of thinking about the reasoning behind that order.
The guard’s armour having been disabled by EM and still containing a living occupant, the Prador drone’s initial conjecture was that Vrell wanted a prisoner to interrogate, yet that did not really gel. There would not be enough time to break the guard’s conditioning sufficiently to learn anything useful about Vrost’s plans. The true Vrell might have sought to access systems in the armour so as to break into Vrost’s com frequencies had it not been that the Prador above made little attempt to encode them. It seemed it did not matter what Vrell knew: from an utterly superior position, Vrost intended to obliterate them. Perhaps curiosity then, just that—Vrell wanting to know, or rather confirm, what that armour contained? Of course, such speculation was based on what the drone’s own aims would have been. The real Vrell, however, had moved far beyond him. The drone could not, for example, see any possibility of repairing a surge-damaged U-space engine, yet his creator was obviously making plans to do so.
The water here was still murky from the first kinetic missile strike, and other clouds of silt and detritus were spreading out from the more recent explosions. The drone occasionally observed, deep down, turbul and smaller whelks snapping up animals damaged by an earlier blast. When he saw a molly carp cruising by in the distance, he felt an instant of fear caused by an emotional residue of his earlier self. Then anger took over and made him want to go after the creature to deliver some payback, but the real Vrell’s orders did not allow for that. The drone watched the molly carp lashing out a tentacle to bludgeon a passing turbul, cutting it nearly in half before beginning to chomp it down. Boxies shoaled around the carp, like silver bubbles from its mouth, as like ship lice they scavenged scraps. But soon the molly carp was out of sight, and the drone approaching the coordinates Vrell had sent.
The drone immediately detected three metallic objects on the bottom, underneath a cloud of silt. Using his magnetometer, he identified one of the other drones, descended to it, then, from only metres away, extruded a thermic lance and began to bore a hole through its armour. Nothing came over com because the EM pulse had knocked out most of its systems, but doubtless its diagnostic and repair systems, being more hardened to such attacks, were still working, so it knew precisely what was happening to it.
The lance cut in slowly, for this exotic metal contained superconductive layers and had to be eroded away rather than burnt or melted. Finally the lance broke through. The drone switched it off, retracted it, then lined up his missile port to the hole and fired a torp inside his victim. A jet of fire and molten debris spewed from the cavity. The Vrell drone disposed of the next drone in exactly the same manner, then approached the King’s guard.
The armoured Prador’s internal repair systems were more advanced than those of a drone. It responded over com, threatening, promising, but never begging. It had seen what had happened to Vrost’s two drones, and assumed itself in for the same treatment. When the Vrell drone noted the guard attempting to move some of its limbs, internally he checked the charge of some of his laminar batteries, then brought an emitter to bear and fired pulses of electromagnetic radiation at the areas containing the motor controls for the guard’s armour. When the guard ceased moving, the Vrell drone clamped his own claw around the limp claw of the other and, blasting up clouds of silt with his turbines, hauled his captive off the bottom and continued back to the ship.
There were now two sailing ships for her to hunt. At first they moved slowly, and she could easily have caught one of them and pulled it down, but how they managed to sail against the wind puzzled her, so, after only a exploratory touch against one of the rudders, she held back. Slowly she began to understand the interaction of forces involved. The wind was blowing in one direction, the sails angled to catch it. Logic dictated that the wind should push the ship backwards. However, the hull was angled partially into the wind, which was trying to force it sideways through the water. The two forces—wind and water pressure — squeezed the ship between them, like a slippery stone between the opposing faces of a claw, so it shot out sideways, and thus the ship was actually travelling into the wind. This fascinated the giant whelk and, applying this new knowledge to the deep memories of her own life, her understanding of the way forces operated was increased greatly. But the fascination did not last long.