‘Not a nail in sight,’ he commented.
‘Even Hoopers don’t use nails in the construction of their ships,’ said Wade, turning to walk along the perimeter. ‘They use pegs and dovetails and mortise joints, and that has not changed even since abundant metals have become available to them.’
‘You know about shipbuilding?’ Janer asked.
‘That’s just plain woodworking I’m talking about. However,’ Wade tapped his own forehead, ‘I have recently loaded much about the craft.’
Janer paused to consider that. Humans could load information directly into their minds, but to do it they required some kind of hardware in their heads. The process was very much easier for Golem. Just in this short walk down from the compound, Janer had almost forgotten what Wade actually was.
‘Why are you here?’ he asked.
‘Why are you?’ Wade countered, studying him. He then went on, ‘I’m a free Golem, I go where the interest takes me… Now, that looks like a weak point.’ Wade pointed, and it took Janer a second to realize the Golem was indicating at a join in the fence beside one of the pearwood posts.
‘Yes…?’ said Janer cautiously.
Wade gave him an unreadable look, reached out and shoved his fingers through the fence mesh. Janer smelt hot ozone, then Wade pulled, and, sparking and crackling, the fence parted.
‘See, shoddy workmanship,’ said Wade. ‘Shall we?’ He gestured through.
It was certainly dangerous in there, but Janer had always found that avoiding danger usually resulted in danger blindsiding him. Anyway, he was already bored with the prospect of sitting around with the rest of the Hoopers, seeing if it was possible to drink the rum as fast as Forlam could distil it, for they seemed intent on doing little else. That was, he realized, a sign of them having accepted immortality: they were able to be still for long periods. He was not.
‘Okay,’ he said, ducking in ahead of Wade.
The Golem soon overtook him and led the way into the site. Janer hung back for a moment.
‘You still gone?’
No response from the hivelink. He quickly caught up with Wade.
Now, drawing closer to the big ship, Janer began to get a better impression of its sheer scale. The side of it was like a cliff ahead of him; its bows rested on the beach and its stern abutted the first slopes ascending to the peak at the centre of Mortuary Island.
‘How are they going to launch it?’ he asked.
Wade pointed to the bottom of the hull, which was largely concealed by construction materials and machinery. ‘There’s a ramp under there, and a few hundred motorized pallets on which they laid the keel.’
As they passed a stack of timber, Janer peered through a gap to see the gleam of a metal caterpillar track in the undershadows. They moved on past an open container half-filled with pipe fittings and prosaically domestic plumbing items. Another container just behind it contained electrical equipment and next to this rested a half-used reel of insulated and combined five-core S-con and fibre-optic cable. Seeing such standard items here was a bit of a disappointment to Janer—until Wade gestured to something on the hull itself.
‘I knew it would be here,’ said the Golem.
In the side of the ship was a large open portal containing the kind of iris door more commonly found on space stations. It would be submerged, Janer realized, below the waterline. As they drew closer he saw that inside, resting on a ramp leading to this door, was the flattened-torpedo shape of a large submersible. Around the door itself were the familiar arc-shaped sections of black metal that were the business end of a shimmer-shield generator. Of course a shimmer-shield was perfect for this, since it could let the craft out without letting the water in.
‘Not quite what I would have expected,’ he said.
‘To the letter of Windcheater’s laws, though not exactly in the spirit of them,’ explained Wade. ‘That sail wants only sailing ships on the surface of the ocean, and no AG vehicles at all in the sky, but no other technologies have been proscribed.’
‘Why do they need this, anyway?’ Janer wondered.
‘That’ll be Lineworld Developments. No doubt they originally had some profitable enterprise in mind.’ Wade shrugged. ‘Of course they’ll not be pursuing it now.’
Just then a paint-bespattered skeletal Golem stepped in front of them.
‘You should not be here,’ it said. ‘It is unsafe.’
Wade ignored it, just walking on past.
‘Yeah, you’re telling me,’ said Janer, following his new friend.
Someone hammered him hard on the back, and Orbus responded by spewing the sea water from his lungs and taking his first shuddering breath of frigid stinking air. He opened his eyes and immediately wished he had stayed drowned, but that was unfortunately an impossibility for any Hooper over a century in age.
‘This is not a nice place,’ said Drooble, going on to smack his fist against the chest of another crewman to bring him ungently back to consciousness.
There were ten of them confined in the dank space. The cable bag was now hanging from one weed-covered wall which seemed to be scaled with rough slabs of metal. Orbus guessed that one of the crew had broken the frayed strand he could see, to spill them all out on the floor. Certainly their captor or captors would not have thought to free them, for Orbus recognized, from old memory, what this place was.
He had been only fifty years old when the Prador had seized Imbretus Station and herded human captives aboard their ship, before targeting the station’s reactors with particle beams to leave it a spreading cloud of debris and incandescent gas. The brutality and horror of the ensuing journey was not so clear in his memory, though he did know that he had done terrible things in order to be one of the few survivors to reach Spatterjay. But once on the planet he now called home, he clearly remembered being made to walk through tanks of leeches to ensure infection by their virus, just as he still felt the shame of how he avoided coring by being ready to play an active part in the sinister games of the Eight…
Orbus stood up, a little shakily, and probed the rip across the front of his plasmesh shirt. The harpoon wound was sealed now—just a star-shaped indentation in his solar plexus. He felt around his back and ran his fingers over lumpy nuggets of scar tissue. He was starving—injury hunger. The others, similarly injured, would feel the same. Drooble had probably been one of the first to rouse, because the drone had captured him without harpooning, his only injuries being those Orbus inflicted earlier with a lash because of the man’s disobedience—and the drowning, of course. The Old Captain looked around. Most of his crew did not look so good. They had bled, and some of their wounds were still raw and red. One of them remained unconscious despite Drooble’s pummelling, and all of them appeared thinner. Their skin was now blue, but not with cold.
‘Well, Cap’n, what do you reckon?’ Drooble asked.
Orbus reckoned that his own brain had not been working right for a large portion of a thousand years. The other Captains were right: there was something wrong with him. He must have been mad not to have recognized a Prador war drone the instant he set eyes on it. But then, even if he had, what more could he have done?
‘I reckon we’re fucked,’ said Captain Orbus.
Drooble turned and gazed at him. ‘No shit?’
It was a typically provocative response from a crewman who enjoyed being punished, but Orbus felt too weary to respond to it.
‘If Prador take prisoners, it’s for one of two purposes,’ he said. ‘That means we’re either to be the main course, or we’re going to be cored and thralled.’
‘Prador?’ someone murmured incredulously.