They changed position and Boris kicked open the ammunition box situated below the swivel-mounted cannon. He took out a paper-wrapped charge and shoved it down the barrel, ram-rodded it down, followed by wadding then a pack of stones. Then he pierced through the ignition hole and primed the flash pan.
‘Anne, up here!’ Ambel called. In a moment she came up from the deck, where she had been readying the rakes and riddles used to harvest amberclams. ‘Take the helm,’ Ambel told her, ‘I need to ready my ‘buss.’ As she took the helm he scrambled down the ladder to the deck, unhooked his enormous blunderbuss from the forecabin wall, and prepared it in much the same way Boris had prepared the deck cannon. Both weapons were equally effective, but only Ambel was strong enough to hold the blunderbuss and aim it properly.
‘Juniors below!’ he ordered as at the last moment the Treader came about, the sail reefing both fabric sails and itself, and climbing high up the mast, out of reach. The ship drew up sideways against a bank of sand, next to which the water was still deep. Sild dropped anchor then hurried off to find his musket. Peck swiftly freed his shotgun from its wrapping of oily cloth, fed some shells into it, then pumped one into the chamber. Already the prill had spotted the ship and were running across the sand in their curious revolving manner, leaving spiral trails behind them.
‘I said juniors below,’ said Ambel.
Sprout hung his head and, trailing his machete behind him, slowly followed the other junior crew. Ambel hoped Sprout would soon understand juniors do not heal as quickly as older Hoopers, and this was the only reason Ambel sent him below on such occasions.
‘And leave your machete—I’ll be needing it.’
Anne tied off the helm, then half scrambled and leapt down to the deck. In a moment she had reached the rail, taken a case from one of the lockers, and out of it her laser carbine.
‘Save your shots,’ Ambel warned. ‘You’ve only got one more energy canister for that.’
Anne nodded just as Boris fired the deck cannon.
The leading prill fragmented in a great gout of sand, broken carapace and detached sickle legs. Ambel fired too and blew more of them to pieces, then hurriedly reloaded. Sild fired once, splitting one prill into two halves, which flipped over backwards with legs wriggling in the air. Anne picked off the ones closest to the ship with brief pulsed shots that caused them to leap in the air, trailing steam from the holes burnt through them. Then the remaining creatures hit the side of the ship with a sound like hail on a wooden board. Ambel and Boris fired yet again, simultaneously, fragmenting more of the creatures below. In a second one of them was up on the rail, red eyes shooting around its rim like some nightmare music centre. Sild smashed it away with his musket butt, but more of them swarmed over. Anne calmly replaced her carbine in its box, picked up Sprout’s machete, then began laying about herself, chopping the creatures to pieces. Peck continued blasting them as they came over the rail then, having emptied his shotgun, he reversed it to use as a club. As always, using his fists and boots, Ambel turned the surrounding deck into a shellfish bouillabaisse minus the vegetables. Boris was soon down with him and joining in. The last prill over the rail he caught under his hobnail boot, then pressed his full weight down, crushing its shell.
‘Juniors up!’ Ambel bellowed. He walked over to Anne and held out his hand for the machete. With a quizzical look she passed it to him. ‘You take Sild and the rest of the lads and get all the amberclams you can.’
‘And you?’ she asked.
‘Peck can guard my back,’ he slapped the gory blade against his gory hand. ‘I’m gonna get me the best part of a leech.’
Erlin gazed down at the island, and it seemed a perfect agate in the pale green ocean, but for one flaw near its edge. This flaw had obviously been scraped out and repositioned just offshore. As Zephyr began to spiral down through cold dispersed cloud, her view became clearer, and she realized she was seeing an enormous ship. Ah, so a piece of the island had been scraped out and beaten into a ship mould to produce this. You’d think it would sink being made of all that stone and mud…
On some level Erlin knew she was not thinking in any logical manner. The craft rising from the island she recognized as a planetary shuttle, but also thought it a huge fly rising from the island’s wound. She wondered if the ground had bled, or if the island had squealed when that big leech, now resting offshore, had bitten from it such a huge bloody lump of its flesh.
‘There the Golem leave to serve out the rest of their indenture to Cybercorp elsewhere. Perhaps some of them, in time, will wear bodies like mine. I envy them such choices,’ said Zephyr.
Bodies… lump of flesh… blood…
Before she knew what she was doing, Erlin was trying to claw at the creature above her. She was suddenly so very hungry. Then abruptly she saw her extruded tongue waving before her face and some sanity returned. She gaped at her broken fingernails and vaguely recollected that she had attacked the sail before. Then she stared at her dark blue fingers, mesmerized.
‘What we going to do when we get down there?’ asked one of the other two sails. ‘We can’t let her loose like this. Things might get a bit… hectic.’
‘Arrangements have been made,’ Zephyr replied.
Gazing down at the planet through satellite eyes, the Warden observed Erlin’s arrival at Mortuary Island, and though the AI had not interfered, it felt some shedding of responsibility. Then, gazing through many other eyes at ground level, it felt frustration. The Golem agent of the ancient hive mind was practically untraceable now. In the time frame posited, thousands of Golem had arrived and departed, including the indentured ones who had built the Sable Keech. This was worrying, for no one could be sure what the hive mind’s motives or intentions might be.
That hive mind, being old and nigh incomprehensible, did not have much official contact with humans and AIs, though through its own kind it did have some converse with those skirting the edge of the Polity and its laws—humans, aliens and AIs. Through them it must have gained access to the technology enabling it to accelerate its thought processes beyond pheromonal transfer, and to send out its eyes and agents beyond Earth. It was supposed that, like the younger mind before it, it was here after the formula for sprine, but that was dubious. Some claimed that a breed of hornets carrying sprine in their stings would counterbalance the strength and nigh indestructibility of Hoopers, and that Polity AIs were not averse to this. It was a myth, which, foolishly unchecked, led one young hive mind (a mere ten thousand years of age) to attempt colonization here with adapted hornets. Had it succeeded, the Warden’s drones would then have been busy with canisters of insecticide until every last hornet here was dead.
The Polity contained many other individuals potentially as dangerous as Hoopers: free Golem, augmented humans, dracomen and the ineffable Dragon that was their source, and various other aliens. Moreover, just the existence of sprine acted as a counterbalance. Of course Polity AIs had long ago analysed that substance and could easily manufacture it. The Warden knew that one runcible jump away lay a stock of weapons that employed it. A rail-gun firing sprine-tipped darts would certainly be more effective than any hornet, and that was just the least of the weapons available. The young mind’s claim to be seeking personal armament for defence, just like any other Polity citizen was allowed, was rather weak when individual hornets comprised only a minuscule fraction of it. Hornets with killing stings could not be allowed, especially since they could inadvertently wipe out the limited population of an alien race, the sails, who owed their incredibly long life spans to the virus inside them. Surely the ancient mind knew this, which again begged the question, why was it here?