‘You waste useful tools.’

Frisk turned and rammed the barrel of the gun up under Speaker’s chin.

‘This is not your tool to waste,’ said Speaker.

Frisk pulled her arm down in a jerky motion, holstered the weapon, pulled her injector from her belt and placed it against her own neck. Her right leg was quivering and her cheek had started to ache again. These nerve conflicts were becoming more and more frequent. Was it being here? The stress? The excitement? The priozine soon flooded her system and stilled the rebellion of this body she had stolen.

‘Stupid,’ she said to herself, then glared down along the deck to Shib.

‘Get that thing secured,’ she ordered him, with a nod at the sail’s body hanging in folds where it had released its holds during its convulsions. Shib looked with distaste at the sail, then went to obey. From where they stood, outside the cabin, Svan and Tors gave each other a look.

Once Frisk was out of hearing, Tors said, ‘If the detector is not picking up Keech’s aug that means it’s off, and he’s probably dead. Doesn’t she realize that?’

‘Maybe… whatever. She pays the money and we do what she says. Mad as a pan-fried AI she may be, but she’s got the shillings,’ replied Svan, and went off to assist Shib. Tors stared up at the Hooper Captain, and after a moment fetched a bucket of seawater to throw over the smouldering helm.

Drum continued, mindlessly, to steer his ship.

Using the deck winch, Ambel brought the first carboy up from the hold. Using muscle and great care, he detached the cargo net it was contained in and took it over to below the forecabin ladder. After attaching a rope, he climbed up on to the cabin, then hauled the carboy up there, where he tied it to the rail before breaking the seal and extracting the bung with a large corkscrew. Anne and Pland grimly watched the proceedings, while Boris finished setting up the spinner and lubricating the cogwheels with turbul grease.

Peck came up on deck with a coil of tube looped over his shoulder. He threw one end up to Ambel, who caught it and inserted it in the carboy. On the lower deck, below the rail, the three armour-glass vessels Ambel had purchased at great cost twenty years before stood wedged in a rack. Peck sucked on the tube and watched carefully as the green bile came up out of the carboy and started to descend towards him, then quickly took the tube out of his mouth and put his finger over the end. Leech bile in the mouth wouldn’t kill a Hooper, but it would make him sick for months. Actually swallowing the mouthful would kill, though. Taking his finger off the end, he inserted the tube into one of the vessels. The bile flowed on down and it began to fill. Peck took this opportunity to put on his gloves. Once one vessel was full, he pinched the tube and transferred it to the next, careful not to get any of the bile on himself. The contents of the carboy filled all three.

‘You ready there, Boris?’ Ambel asked.

‘I am, Captain,’ said Boris, pulling on his own gloves and going over to help Peck transfer the vessels to the horizontal wheel of the spinner, and clamp them in place.

‘Let’s get winding, lads,’ continued Ambel.

Gollow and three of the other juniors were the first to come to the double winding handles, as Ambel came down from the forecabin. They put their weight against the handles and heaved. Greased cogs began to turn and the chain leading in underneath the spinner began to move. Slowly at first, the wheel began to turn. Peck and Boris removed their gloves and waited their turn at the handles, as did Anne and Pland. Ambel waited as well. He always went last, and he turned the handles by himself. It was an adequate demonstration of the difference in strength between juniors, seniors, and the Old Captain. They had a long day ahead of them.

Morning dragged into afternoon, and it was the next turn for Pland and Boris at the handles. The wheel was whirring around nicely, and the bile was just beginning to separate in the vessels. In the bottom half of each it lay thick and green, with a layer of cloudy fluid above it. When it came to Ambel’s turn, there was a thin layer of clear fluid at the surface. As he worked the handles some of the crew fished for boxies, and others went below to rest their aching limbs.

By mid-afternoon a centimetre of clear fluid rested at the top of each vessel. At this point Ambel released the handles and let the spinner wind to a stop. He called Peck over and together they siphoned this clear fluid into a smaller, open-topped vessel. This container they took into Ambel’s cabin to place in a secure framework he had earlier clamped to his desk. It wouldn’t do to lose all that work to the first squall that came along. The stuff remaining in the larger vessels, they tipped over the side.

‘Should be ready by tomorrow morning,’ Ambel stated.

‘Aye, the bugger,’ said Peck in the same grim tone that all of them had taken on this day. It was a serious business planning to kill something a thousand years old, no matter how evil it might be.

SM12 scanned the three ships and found nothing to make it suspicious. It recognized the crews of each vessel, having come across them many times before in its travels. Completing its circuit of Tay’s island, it experienced dronish frustration. Where was she? The Batian’s deflated dinghy still lay under the sheet-leaves where they had beached and there had been no signs of any other landings on the other beaches. Nothing in the air either, so that left one choice. The iron cockle dropped out of the sky with the aerodynamics of a brick, entered the sea with a huge splash, and switched on its sonar. Immediately it picked up signs of movement all around it, but nothing with a metallic signature. It accelerated, kicking up a cloud of silt behind, and ran electrostatic scans for as far as it could. It really needed some help. Taking an instant decision, it shot out of the water and broadcast.

‘Where’s SM Thirteen?’ it asked.

‘SM Thirteen is hypersonic and will be with you directly,’ said the Warden. ‘You are having trouble locating Rebecca Frisk?’

‘Has to have gone into the sea. She’s not on the island,’ Twelve replied. It then dropped, and started scanning once again. It was soon tracing something it thought might be promising when there was a splash above it, and soon an iron seahorse was cruising along beside it.

‘Want a hand?’ asked Thirteen.

‘Yes, I’m on to something now,’ said Twelve.

‘You realize that hammer-whelk shells have a slight piezoelectric property?’ said Thirteen.

In chagrin Twelve said, ‘Well, aren’t you the whelk expert. Take the north side. If she’s using an escape pod as a submersible, there should be ionic traces. She’s probably heading away fast. We need to get on to this.’

SM13 tilted and shot for the surface. Shortly after it was gone, SM12’s underspace transceiver opened.

‘Anything?’ asked the Warden.

‘Nothing yet, but I’m sure we’ll find her,’ replied Twelve.

‘I’m glad you’re so confident,’ said the Warden. ‘I have to wonder if there’s not something we’re missing. No matter — she will never leave.’

‘They’ve gone to the atolls,’ said Captain Ron, thumping a finger down on the chart.

‘How can you be sure?’ asked Erlin.

Janer stood back and didn’t question. His concerns were all with Keech, strapped in his bunk below, fighting to regain control of his body. His convulsions had not let up for twenty hours and it seemed his return to life might only be temporary.

‘Ambel’s got his own refining gear. If he’s having a good hunt this early, he’ll want to refine what he’s got, then see if he can get some more before the season ends. For refining he needs a stable mooring. Anyway, we’d have found him by now if n he’d been here.’