‘Well, there went the cavalry,’ said Boris.

‘Yeah,’ said Roach, and gritted his teeth while Boris put in another stitch to close the split in Roach’s arm. It seemed a somewhat pointless exercise, what with a fire raging below and gouts of steam hissing through the holes in the deck.

‘That was Keech,’ explained Boris, now applying the needle and thread to some of the more embarrassing rips in his own tattered trousers.

‘Yeah,’ said Roach and, feeling a vague tingling in his fingers, he tried to flex them. He managed a little movement, but there would be no real strength in either his hand or his arm until flesh and bone began properly to knit. He thought it would be nice if they enjoyed the time to do so.

‘Should we try and put it out?’ Boris wondered.

‘No chance. This ship’s bound with sea gourd resin. Once you get that alight, you ain’t gonna get it out again,’ Roach replied.

‘Maybe the ship’s boat’ll come back,’ Boris suggested, while studying Roach’s expression.

‘The boat ain’t coming back,’ said Roach.

Boris nodded his head once at this confirmation — he hadn’t seen what happened to the juniors in the ship’s rowing boat, but he’d a damned good idea.

Abruptly, the deck tilted, and swathes of steam roared out of the open hatch. Boris and Roach peered over the side at the swarm of leeches attracted by the commotion, and by bits of Goss floating in the water. Beyond this writhing mass, the molly carp was cruising.

Boris instantly dropped his needle and thread and scuttled across to pick up the handgun Roach had dropped earlier.

‘I’ll not have happen to me what happened to my Captain,’ Boris swore.

‘I ain’t neither,’ said Roach, thinking what a waste of time it had been to sew up his arm. It had kept the boy occupied anyway. He stared at the water, ignoring the weapon Boris was handling so nervously. He tried not to wince when Boris reached over and pressed the warm snout of it against his head.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said.

‘No point delaying,’ said Boris. ‘Only makes it harder.’

‘I said wait a minute,’ said Roach, angrily knocking Boris’s hand away.

‘What for?’

‘Look,’ said Roach, pointing at the sea.

An iron seahorse had just risen to the surface, the seawater fizzing all about it, and leeches jerking spastically in their hurry to get away. It tilted so as to glare up at them with one topaz eye, the other one burnt black.

‘We should attack ‘em, splash ‘em, kill ‘em, hit ‘em…’ was the essence of the communication between drones one to ten with ‘attitude’. All ten of the drones, now they were in atmosphere, had extruded stubby wings to which were attached their weapons pods. In one part of itself, the Warden agreed. Frisk’s ship had encountered one other and left it burning. Sable Keech’s seven-century search for justice and vengeance had ended in a few brief explosions, and it seemed unlikely there would be any chance at another reification for him. But all these were emotional issues. On a flat calculation of life and death, the sailing ship was unimportant. First, the Warden had to find the Prador spacecraft, for from it could issue destruction perhaps an order of magnitude greater.

‘SM Twelve, I want them in pairs, covering the relevant eight sectors — same division as for geostudy. I want all signals reported. Specifically I want thrall-unit carrier waves and command codes. It won’t be a direct transmission, as that would be too easy to trace should we get hold of any thrall units at the receiving end. Somewhere down there, the enemy will have secondary and perhaps tertiary emitters.’

‘Coded U-space signals are difficult to detect,’ observed Twelve.

‘Almost impossible would be a more accurate summation. It is not the signal itself you will detect, but overspill from the secondary emitters before the signal starts tunnelling. On detecting this overspill, you will have found an emitter. I want no action taken against emitters located. Just transmit everything you get to me.’

‘Yes, Warden,’ said Twelve.

The muttering from the other drones, which formed a backdrop to SM12’s reply, made the Warden wonder just how good an idea it had been to load Sniper’s little program into them. No matter — the AI returned its attention to the information packages coming in through from the submind ghost of itself trawling the loose AI net forming around the Prador worlds. These packages now detailed the rabid progression of events in the Third Kingdom and were fascinating. It seemed that the Prador were almost desperate for closer ties and trade opportunities with the Polity and, as had been demonstrated quite graphically before the sector AI, with such drastic changes in the offing, the old guard there was having trouble hanging on to power. Already some further high figures among them had not done so well. Three had been assassinated by direct methods: in two cases by explosives and in the third case by an injection of a putrefying virus. Two others had been killed by their own blanks after control programs had been subverted. Now that was what the Warden had found most interesting.

Ebulan, one of the highest-ranking Prador in the Kingdom, was also of particular interest to the Warden. It was he who once had dealings with Hoop and his merry crew, and who had become rich and consequently powerful on the trade in human blanks. This hideous practice was now becoming frowned on in the Prador Kingdom, because of the change of Zeitgeist that had led to this aim for closer ties with the Polity. So Ebulan’s power was waning.

Ebulan — that name came up repeatedly. Could it be that agents of his were the ones here on Spatterjay? If so, what was their purpose?

Floating just below the surface of the waves, the turtle-shaped remote probe folded its emitter dish and switched to passive observation. Twenty similar devices scattered across the surface of the sea performed a similar action, only two of them remaining in the relevant areas to maintain the U-space signal relay. They were not AI these machines — the Prador neither liked nor fully understood such technology — but they had proved more than sufficient to their limited task. Now that would have to change, however.

In his ship deep in an oceanic trench Ebulan watched the pictographic information sliding in on one screen then turned his attention to another screen showing a real-time image. Foam bubbled from his jaws as he chewed on a lump of putrid meat, and then spat it out for the delectation of the lice skittering round the floor.

The Warden had to know that a ship was down here, or it would not have brought out this kind of firepower, though the AI obviously did not yet realize just what kind of ship it was dealing with, else it would be screaming for help right now. Ebulan disconnected one control box — the human blank concerned slumping at a scanning console — and direct-linked into a rear hold. There, through the box, he got an image of the four heavy-armour drones he carried with him. Each was a flattened ovoid four metres across, armed with rail-guns, missile launchers, and screen projectors. These, again, were not AI: the intelligences inside each of them derived from the surgically altered and then flash-frozen brains of four of Ebulan’s many children. They were totally loyal, fixed as they were in a state of constant adolescence — enslaved by their parents’ pheromones.

As Ebulan sent a signal, red lights ignited in recesses in the drones’ exotic metal shells. The hold was flooded with muddy seawater and rapidly filled up, then a triangular door opened on to the deep ocean. The four drones motored out into the murk, the images viewed by their recessed eyes coming up on the screen before Ebulan.