‘Message for Sable Keech,’ it said.

‘What now?’ he asked.

‘Link requested from Hive transponder.’

Keech glanced back at the hexagonal box in the scooter’s luggage compartment. He’d almost forgotten about that.

‘Permission for link granted,’ he said.

First came the buzzing, and then the Hive mind came online.

‘Do you have the package?’

Keech replied, ‘I have the package, but I won’t be taking it to Janer just yet.’

The buzzing took on an angry tone. ‘We had an agreement,’ said the Hive mind.

Keech watched the last red light change to green, then detached the cleanser and carefully pushed the tubes back into place.

‘We had an agreement,’ the Hive mind repeated.

‘The agreement is off. I need to return to Coram and make use of the medical facilities there.’

‘You have a problem?’ the mind asked, injecting ersatz concern into its voice.

‘I have a problem,’ Keech said.

‘What kind of problem?’ asked the mind.

‘At a stretch, you could call it a medical one,’ replied Keech

‘Erlin Tazer Three Indomial is with Janer. Perhaps she could help you. I believe she travels nowhere without an extensive collection of medical and pathological research equipment.’

‘So nice of you to be thinking of me,’ said Keech, bracing his hand against the scooter and standing up.

‘Was that sarcasm or irony?’ asked the mind.

‘Probably both,’ said Keech, dropping the cleanser into the back of the scooter.

‘I’m never sure which is which,’ said the mind.

Keech stared at the scooter, trying to decide if he should risk flying to the Dome. His vision was still tunnelling and there were odd squares flicking up in the visual field fed from his aug. A hissing crack interrupted his decision-making process. Automatically he ducked down, only to stoop into a cloud of smoke that had gouted from his own kneecap.

‘You’re not going anywhere, reif!’ someone shouted.

For one long horrible moment Keech could not decide if this was reality or not. The two Batians who came striding out of the dingle at the head of the beach were like so many others he had seen and killed over the years. Then, to his horror he realized he had forgotten seeing these people earlier at the shuttle port. He tried to dispel anxieties about what this failing memory could mean, as he had more exigent concerns: two Batians here — with, no doubt, the other three not far behind.

‘You know, you’ve made our job so very easy,’ spat the man of this pair.

Keech said nothing. He gazed at the woman as she kept her laser carbine centred on him. The man holstered his weapon with a kind of casual contempt. It was the mistake they had always made. They were so very confident in their ability to kill. Weren’t they such good shots? But then it was like fire and ash: fire will not burn something that has already been burned.

‘Who sent you?’ Keech asked, as he had asked many times before.

The man smiled nastily and gave no answer — as before. Keech nodded and drew his pulse-gun from his belt holster.

‘Drop it!’ shouted the woman with the carbine.

Keech raised his weapon and carefully aimed it. Laser shots punched smoking holes through his chest and through his stomach, but did not spoil his aim. He fired once: a black hole appeared in the woman’s forehead, and the back of her skull turned into a blooming cloud behind her. As she staggered back and went over, Keech turned and mounted his scooter. The man just watched this in stunned horror, before thinking to reach again for his own weapon.

‘You forget, I’m already dead,’ said Keech, before slamming his scooter up into the sky.

A wind was blasting the ship along at a good rate of knots, and spray was coming up over the bow. Erlin watched Janer come up on to the deck and gaze about in surprise.

‘Got his sea legs, then,’ said Captain Ron.

Erlin turned and searched for a trace of irony in Ron’s expression, and found none. She returned her attention to Janer as he walked to the rail and tossed something silvery over the side. The silvery object fell in an arc but, before it hit the waves, it corrected and shot off under its own power. Captain Ron grunted in surprise and, when Erlin turned to him, he seemed embarrassed.

‘Message carrier,’ he said, nodding toward the receding object. ‘Used to send ‘em in the war.’

‘What war?’ Erlin asked.

‘Prador,’ explained Ron tersely.

‘Oh.’

Erlin looked away from him as she absorbed that. Ron was nearly as old as Ambel, and it was well to be reminded of this fact. It became too easy to view the likes of Ron and Ambel as relatively normal. Their apparent simplicity was deceptive, as the Old Captains had centuries of experience, and probably had forgotten more than she had learnt in her mere span of two hundred and forty years. She had actually forgotten that most Old Captains fell into an age range in the upper half of a thousand years. Senior seamen came in at the lower half. Herself?… she qualified as a senior, but only that. How easy it was to forget the way things were here. Those of the crew classified as juniors, and whom the likes of Ambel referred to as ‘lads’, were often over a century old. She wondered then how Ambel viewed her. Was she a child to him? Had the anger she had felt at his seeming complacency been seen by him as a childish fit of pique? What — when she found him — would be his reaction to her? Stupid child, she told herself as she watched Janer approach.

‘What message?’ asked Ron.

‘No message,’ said Janer as he climbed up on to the cabin-deck. ‘Just a dead hornet going home.’

‘Told you the fibres clog ‘em,’ said Ron.

‘Apparently so,’ admitted Janer. ‘Where are we going?’

Erlin replied, ‘Captain Drum sighted the Treader heading out for the feeding grounds. We’re going after it.’

‘What feeds there?’

‘Leeches — big ones.’

Janer nodded his acknowledgement and grimaced at the scar on his hand.

Erlin turned to Ron again. ‘Ambel said he came here after the war. In all the time I was with him I never questioned that, but I do now wonder if he was telling the truth.’

‘Couldn’t say,’ he said. ‘I came here a century after it was all over, and didn’t meet him until a century after that.’

‘You came here a century after the war?’ Janer interjected.

Ron glanced at him. ‘I was getting old and the geriatric treatments in the Polity weren’t so good then. Seemed like a good idea at the time.’

Janer glanced at Erlin to see how she was responding to this — she with her opinion of people searching for ‘miracles’. Her expression gave nothing away so he returned his attention to Ron.

‘What did you do in the war?’ Janer asked, parodying himself at the gaucheness of the question, and then wishing he’d kept his mouth shut once he saw Ron’s expression.

‘I was in a unit fighting out of the Cheyne outer systems. War drones and cyber-boosted troopers. We ran sabotage missions into their shipyards and the barracks where they kept their human-blank troopers. It was all a long time ago.’

Janer was fascinated, but he could see that, as far as Ron was concerned, it was not long enough ago. He glanced at Erlin, hoping that she might have something to ask, but Erlin was gazing out to sea with a slightly lost expression on her face.

‘Do you mind saying anything more about it?’ Janer eventually asked.

‘I do mind,’ said Ron, ending the conversation.

Shib stared down at Nolan, and then abruptly holstered his gun. Why hadn’t he reacted faster? And why hadn’t Nolan’s shots brought that bastard down? Just then, Svan, Tors, and Dime came crashing out of the dingle, searching for someone to shoot.

‘You missed him,’ Svan stated.

Shib glared at her and gestured to Nolan.