‘Oh God, it was him.’ Erlin shuddered.

‘Bugger!’ Peck yelled again, and went roaring across the clearing after the man-thing. Ambel caught him by his jacket collar and nipped him on to his back. With a sick expression on her face, Erlin grabbed her medkit and went over to where Forlam lay moaning in the undergrowth. Ron chose that moment to snort awake and sit upright.

‘What’s going on?’ asked the Captain.

Janer stared at him, then cracked up. This was all just too bizarre. He sat on the ground and laughed so hard his stomach hurt — this inappropriate hilarity ending with a fit of coughing. Ron stared at him with a puzzled expression, then transferred his attention to Ambel, calmly reloading his blunderbuss, then to what Erlin was doing. Pland and Anne were holding Forlam down while she worked on him. She had picked up Janer’s heat sheet and was cutting it into wide strips. Nothing else was big enough to suffice as a dressing for the hole in the crewman’s body.

‘Bugger,’ said Peck, sitting upright.

Ron stood up and walked over to examine Forlam. There he exchanged a few brief words with Erlin before coming back, obviously irritated, to Janer and the rest.

‘Best get packed and moving,’ he said.

‘Forlam?’ asked Janer.

‘I’ll carry him. We gotta catch that thing afore its head finds it,’ explained Ron.

‘Catch it?’ said Janer, but Ron was no longer listening. He had his attention fixed on Ambel who had pulled on gloves to open a waxed packet secured at his belt. Ambel then took out a single red crystal and crumbled it into the sheath of his knife. He then spat into that sheath and replaced the knife.

‘Best be moving,’ he growled and stared towards where the Skinner’s body had vanished.

The Hive mind chose that opportune moment to address Janer. ‘Frisk’s ship has moored in the cove,’ it announced.

‘Better and better,’ Janer spat.

Rebecca Frisk stared at the open door, and the two human blanks waiting there. The leading one, a heavily muscled man with virus-blue skin and a mass of scar tissue down the side of his face, gestured at her with the nerve-inducer he held. She rose and walked forwards, and the two of them parted to allow her past. She considered trying to snatch a holstered weapon, then shelved the idea. These blanks were as old as the Captains and, like all the other bodies she and Jay had supplied to the Prador, had been infected with the Spatterjay virus from the moment of capture. Their bodies would be much stronger than the body she inhabited, since it had been infected for several centuries less than theirs. She might be able to knock the Batians about, but not these two.

Vrell waited for her on the lower deck, turning to watch as she climbed through the hatch. To one side the two mercenaries stood glaring. Frisk immediately noted that they had been disarmed.

‘You will go ashore,’ said Vrell. He gestured with one of his legs to a ship beached there. ‘Ashore are Sable Keech, Gosk Balem and the thing that was once Jay Hoop. It does not concern me what you do there.’

‘I’ll get Jay,’ said Frisk.

‘That does not concern me. You will not remain aboard this ship.’

‘Why not?’

Vrell turned away from her, and she felt the hard hands of the blanks close on her upper arms. They moved her over to where the two Batians stood.

Vrell continued, ‘You no longer serve a purpose. The Convocation has been called and all the Old Captains are coming to attend it. Within days they will all be here, to discuss the fate of Gosk Balem. I must keep this ship here until then. You pose a threat to the completion of my task merely by being on board. You are not under my control — nor are your mercenaries. You will all go ashore.’

‘Will you let us have weapons at least?’ Frisk asked.

While Vrell considered the matter, it was Speaker who replied.

‘She and her mercenaries may indeed take weapons ashore. They will not be able to get back through your defences.’

‘Ebulan! What is this? What are you doing? I thought we were friends,’ cried Frisk.

‘You wax sentimental, human. You have been an inefficient tool I tolerated only because there was no easy replacement for you. You became a living proof of what I achieved during the war with your kind and a demonstration of the source of my power. I brought you here to serve another purpose, even though you had become an embarrassment to me and a danger to my political ambitions. As Vrell has stated: You no longer serve that purpose.’

Rebecca Frisk stared expressionlessly at Speaker, and then turned to the rope ladder leading down to the ship’s boat. One of the blanks filled a rucksack with a selection of weapons and tossed it over to the Batians. Svan picked up the sack with a glare at the heavily armed blanks. With a final look of hatred flung at Vrell, she followed Frisk down the ladder. Shib went after her with a similar expression.

‘Isn’t it dangerous to let them live?’ asked Vrell, as he watched the boat being rowed ashore by the male Batian.

‘Not really,’ said Speaker. ‘And it pleases me for things to end this way.’

‘I do not understand, Father,’ said Vrell.

‘I do in fact retain some feeling for Rebecca Frisk and find in myself a reluctance to kill her, as would be logical — here and now. So it pleases me that she is going ashore, since I know that it will please her to hunt these allies of Sable Keech. It also pleases me that humans will be running around killing other humans; that there will be so much irrelevant drama. In the end they will all die: the Old Captains, Gosk Balem, Hoop and our dear Rebecca too.’

‘They may try to seize this ship,’ warned Vrell.

‘The weapons they now have are not sufficient to the task. You are safe where you are, and you are sure to complete your mission successfully. You will be remembered,’ said Ebulan.

‘Thank you, Father,’ said Vrell.

‘The Convocation — that was the reason, nothing else,’ said Svan.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Frisk, eyeing the weapon Svan held trained on her while Shib rowed them ashore.

‘Of course you don’t. For too long you’ve thought the world revolved around you. Ebulan has his own agenda, and you’ve been incidental to it all along. I had that figured as soon as Vrell came on board. Ebulan brought you here because only the presence of someone as notorious as you would be considered important enough to bring all the Old Captains together in Convocation. Coincidentally Gosk Balem was also discovered still to be alive, and a Convocation already called. That probably happened even before Ebulan’s agents finished spreading the news that you were on-planet.’

‘Ebulan wouldn’t do that,’ said Frisk, just for form’s sake. She eased herself into an apparently more comfortable position — one that put her hand closer to Svan’s weapon. As Svan backed away and slowly shook her head, Frisk showed her teeth in what might have been a grin.

‘Ebulan, like all Prador, thinks of humans merely as prosthetic limbs,’ added Svan dryly.

‘Why does Ebulan want a Convocation?’ asked Frisk. ‘What can the Old Captains, those old humans, possibly do for him?’

‘They can die,’ said Svan. ‘The Prador is severing all his prior connections with your coring trade in a permanent manner. I find it surprising that he let you live like this, considering that you are one of the strongest connections. Perhaps that Vrell creature will be sent ashore to mop up the last of us, once it’s finished wiping out the Convocation fleet, and once we’ve meanwhile finished killing each other.’

‘Great, so where do we go from here, then?’ asked Frisk, a sneer in her voice. She shifted closer again, testing Svan’s tolerance, pushing it.

Svan leant back and fired. Frisk jerked back as the beam scorched the side of her face, then reached up to probe the burn with her forefinger. Svan watched her, the flat snout of the QC laser directed at her eyes. Frisk glared back, then carefully settled down where she was, and didn’t try to get nearer again.