The giant whelk realized that, there now being two prey, she could catch one of them straight away and still have another to pursue, thus her quest could both succeed and continue. She was debating with herself which of them to take down when abruptly both vessels turned. Clearly she had been spotted. Surfacing for a moment, she observed the two ships speeding away, then she submerged again, deciding she would go for the second ship, not the primary target.
This pursuit lasted throughout the day and into the night. The moon gave the water a mercury sheen above her, and her happiness only increased upon encountering a turbul missing its tail and thus unable to escape. Forgetting the ships for a moment, she enjoyed a leisurely pursuit of the fish, before using her line to dice it into pieces which she easily gobbled down. Again moving after her original prey, she noticed a repetitive thumping from the sea bottom. It was a sound recalling unclear memories that elicited unexpected primal reactions in her body. The taste she then picked up in the water caused organs inside her to actually begin moving, rearranging themselves. But no, she was determined not to be distracted—that was all just instinct which would return her to the bottom and to a life abandoned. But then, for a moment, her instinct did override intellect, and she found herself banging a tentacle against her shell and releasing something into the water from glands located below her eyes. In reply, the sea-bottom thumping from the male whelk increased in frequency. She shuddered, took firmer control of herself, closed up the glands, and moved on.
17
Peartrunk Trees:
only the trunks of the younger trees are bulbous at the bottom—i.e. pear-shaped. As these trees age and expand, they develop splits that grow wider until the trunk resembles a cage. The trunks are coated with a thick scaly bark that is the preferred diet of land-dwelling heirodonts. The branches spread out in a wide crown, each one of them terminating in knotty tangles of black twigs from which sprout sparse green-and-blue leaves. This plant produces no fruit or seeds, rather sheds one or more of the twig knots, which then grows into a new tree. Diversification is caused by the tree internally shuffling the alleles in each twig knot. But the strangest thing about the peartrunk tree is its symbiosis with the Spatterjay leech. They, for reasons not clearly investigated, immediately head straight for a peartrunk tree when they come ashore, and roost in its branches. Occlusions through the wood of the branches contain material similar to muscle. When a land heirodont then begins tearing off the bark, the tree sends signals through a primitive nervous system to its branch muscles which shake leeches down on the heirodont to drive it away. Older trees are the most sensitive, and it takes only the presence of animal body heat anywhere near to the trunk to cause this reaction. No one knows why, but older trees are populated exclusively by the permanent land leeches—
The blanks in the holding area were immobile, since most of their mental capacity was running the calculations Vrell needed to make for undertaking U-space engine repairs. Now that those calculations were nearly complete, he dropped four of the blanks out of the circuit. These were the ones who were still reliable, as they were not so badly suffering from the effects of starvation and from the havoc the Spatterjay virus was wreaking on them. He sent them trudging to the engine room, watching them closely through cameras in the corridors for signs of any unprogrammed movement. They appeared not to be doing anything outside of his control, but he knew they were fast approaching the time when they might reject their spider thralls. Satisfied at seeing them then begin the tasks he had programmed in—detaching all the optic and S-con cables in preparation for opening the engine casing—he turned his attention to his channel to the ship above.
The remaining blanks nearby, and those spaceship systems he had employed in the same mathematical task, should complete the calculations in a matter of hours. He did not really need the two minds of Aesop and Bones in the sailing ship above for that purpose, but another task had occurred to him.
Ebulan had died because of his perpetual underestimation of the opposition, and Vrell had no intention of being so arrogant and stupid. Above him lay a shipload of reifications and Hoopers, which Ebulan might have ignored as irrelevant but which Vrell considered a danger that must be either neutralized or otherwise distracted. Vrell had already subtly manipulated Taylor Bloc into refusing to give Captain Ron access to the computer system, thus delaying the departure of the Sable Keech long enough for Vrell to get underneath it.
Bloc was the key, and now it was time for less subtle manipulation. That reif was full of bitterness and anger and, in human terms, not entirely sane. He possessed an overwhelming need to control which stemmed from a similarly overwhelming desire for adulation. At one stroke Vrell shut down Bloc’s consciousness, causing the reif to slump from the edge of his bed to the floor. Then the Prador began making some alterations to Bloc’s mind. Once he finished, Bloc would have to obey the Prador’s orders, though he retained free will in everything else. Vrell watched through Bloc’s eyes as the latter awoke and struggled to his feet.
‘Who are you? What are you?’
Vrell did not deign to reply just then. He linked through the now-clear channels in Bloc’s mind, and gazed through the eyes of Aesop and the visual receptors of Bones. After a moment, he returned to Bloc both his mobility and the reif’s control of the others.
‘Secure your ship. Prevent any aboard from moving against me,’ Vrell finally ordered.
‘You are Prador.’ Bloc’s observation contained something like yearning, and Vrell realized this stemmed from the reif’s fanatical interest in Prador thrall technology—control technology. Ignoring the further flood of questions that ensued, he turned the bulk of his attention to another matter in hand.
Despite his present desperate circumstances, Vrell was determined to confirm his suspicions about the King’s guard. The Warden had also obviously been as curious, hence Vrost’s action in destroying the one who had drifted too close to one of die AI’s satellite eyes. The armoured individual now in the drone cache had not detonated for one of two reasons. Either the EM that knocked it out of the sky had fused the relevant circuitry, or else Vrost somehow knew exactly the guard’s location and was awaiting an opportune moment to send the destruction signal—probably when Vrell himself put in an appearance. There was only one real way to find out.
The Prador heaved himself up off the floor and, with his tool chest trailing along behind him, headed out of his sanctum. He noted, as he travelled the dank corridors of the ship, how the omnipresent lice remained somnolent on the wall, only shifting a little on sensing his presence. Lack of food again. He himself had not eaten for some time, and for longer there had been little for the lice to scavenge. Now suddenly aware of his own hunger, he summoned the two leech-headed blanks from where they had collapsed in the corridor outside the holding area. They joined him just as he reached the door to the cache, where he picked one of them up in a claw and began tearing it apart and feeding gobbets of its flesh into his maw. As he ate he noted how much longer his claws had now become, and how their colour was a translucent black like some kind of glass. Then he entered the cache itself.