Sniper accelerated straight towards it. ‘Well, I’ll take you with me, fucker!’ he sent.

The Prador extended its screen in front, but a second after, Sniper’s two missiles — which had now corrected from their tumble — hit it from behind. It still came on, its armour distorted, its screen out, and its engine powering intermittently. Sniper hit it with his APW, then swooped over the top of it as it hurtled towards the sea, a burnt-out shell.

‘You gotta watch that upswing!’ Sniper sent, but had no time to feel satisfaction when another two missiles swung abruptly up from the sea towards him. Again he changed course, curving down towards the atolls. The second Prador came hurtling towards him just above the waves. Sniper aimed himself at one of the atolls, firing off another three missiles. The atoll erupted in a fountain of broken coral, just prior to him flying straight into it. He shot out of the other side of this, trailing dust clouds and leaving two explosions behind him, then turned back towards the approaching Prador. As he fired his APW, violet fire hazed the air between them, terminating on a disk like a white-hot coin — the Prador’s projected shield. The disk went out, and the fire extinguished shortly after. Both drones fired missiles and opened up with their rail-guns. Two of Sniper’s missiles blew in between, but a third took a curve and came at the Prador from the side. After the explosion, Sniper had the satisfaction of seeing the drone lurch through the air, with a split opened in its armour — then the missile he had overlooked came up underneath him and exploded.

‘Oh bollocks,’ groaned the war drone, as he tumbled through the air. His APW was out, and though he still had missiles to launch, they could not get past the molten metal blocking his launch tubes — the same mess that had also scrapped his rail-gun. It was all academic really, as he had little chance of staying airborne for any length of time, with his AG gone as well. Intermittently he spotted the Prador war drone ahead of him. At least it seemed to be having as much trouble as he was. One last chance? Sniper fired his fusion engine at a precisely timed instant, opened out what remained of his legs, and slammed himself into the other drone. Immediately the Prador accelerated and rolled, trying to shake him off.

‘Y’know,’ said Sniper, ‘when the going gets tough…’ And with that he plunged his heavy claw through the split in the Prador’s armour. Its only reply to him was a thin screaming over the ether as it fell towards one of the atolls below.

‘Sniper… Sniper?’ the Warden sent — and didn’t even get back a return signature. ‘SMs One and Two, what happened?’

There was an equivocal humming over the ether before a response came through.

‘Sniper had a run-in with two Prador war drones. We can’t find him,’ explained Two.

‘Yeah, he sure stuffed ‘em,’ added One.

‘But it seems they stuffed him also,’ Two then pointed out and, so saying, transmitted a replay of what it had captured and recorded of Sniper’s last moments.

Stubborn to the end, thought the Warden. In such a crisis Sniper could have linked through and transmitted himself, all of himself. But Sniper had preferred to remain individual, had not wanted to be subsumed. And so, the Warden thought, he is gone in heroic battle. What a waste, and what a disappointment — the Warden had been quite attracted to the idea of changing Sniper.

‘One and Two, join your brother drones off the Skinner’s Island,’ instructed the Warden, and then linked through to Twelve. ‘Twelve, I want you down in that trench, searching for this Prador vessel. We still don’t know quite what we are up against.’

‘On my way,’ sent Twelve.

There were no probes in the area, so Ebulan dispatched the nearest one of them available. This same probe — built in the shape of a small Prador, with thrusters shell-welded underneath — burst from the sargassum where it had been squatting and rocketed up into the sky, then went hypersonic for twenty seconds before shutting down its thrusters and coasting to the edge of the tsunami. To Ebulan it returned an image of the fleet of ships riding the swells behind the initial huge wave, their sails belled to bursting. Maybe one or two of them had been sunk, but no more — the CTD concealed inside the Ahab had not been close enough to cause any real damage. The probe then transmitted back the information that objects were now approaching it at hypersonic speeds. This transmission was abruptly curtailed as the probe became an incandescent cloud of metal vapour.

Ebulan crashed around his chamber, in increasing anger, and it was some time before he could think clearly again. Vrell would soon be in the process of making the change, so would be useless to him now. The pheromones that kept a fully limbed Prador in a state of adolescence until the father of the family died were not present where the adolescent now was, and because the ‘change’ had been suppressed in it for so long, Vrell would make the transformation to adulthood very quickly.

The blanks out there might still be of some use if he dared reconnect their control boxes, but he did not. He did not want again to risk feeling the pain from their bodies. They never felt it as, though having nervous systems, they had no brains to understand the signals from them — he was the one with the brain. Their thrall units were the nearest things they possessed to intelligence, and those devices merely translated verbal orders to action, or acted as the interface between the blank’s nervous system and its controlling Prador mind.

No blanks, no Vrell, and no second-children either. Perhaps the war drones, then? Ebulan spun round and slid up to his array of screens. He used the control box of the blank he had cut in half earlier to try to link through. The whited-out screens threw up nothing but static. The drones had to be all dead?

It was painful to Ebulan to admit to himself that he no longer had any control over this situation, and therefore it might be time to pull out. The thought of doing so left an unpleasant taste in his mouth — like too-fresh human meat — and was just as upsetting to his digestion. What other options were there? He considered the armament carried by his ship. A brief flight and a sweep or two by the particle beams, perhaps a CTD for the island itself, and all who had any direct knowledge of his involvement in the coring trade would become so much airborne ash. All the forms of information storage that the humans so valued were as nothing to the Prador. Only living witnesses counted to them. Ebulan then pondered the consequences of such actions.

The Warden would certainly attack… but was that such a problem? The Warden, though it controlled formidable devices, could not move away from the moon. Its SMs, though they could destroy Ebulan’s war drones — something Ebulan still could not quite get to grips with, as he’d assumed there were only enforcer drones here — stood no chance of getting through this war craft’s armour, nor of surviving assault by its weapons. How formidable exactly were the weapons the Warden controlled? And would they prove so effective with a planet in between? Also, though there would still be living witnesses to his proposed actions, all they would truly witness would be an anonymous attack by a Prador destroyer. No one had yet seen Ebulan himself, as they had in the old days when he came here each Spatterjay year to collect his cargo of cored humans.

The more Ebulan thought about it, the more attractive the case for attacking seemed. It started hormones and juices surging in him that had not flowed for the last thousand years — as they had once done in that time when he still possessed all his legs and a scattering of arms. That Prador medical science had long established such feelings as the first signs of senility, he did not even stop to consider.