‘Atoll GCV 1232, beginning census scan,’ said SM13.
‘You only say that to irritate me,’ said Sniper, as they hovered above an atoll like a huge apple core thrust down into the sea.
‘The Warden’s right, you know,’ said the iron seahorse drone. ‘You’re getting cranky in your old age.’
‘And you think counting snails is a worthwhile pastime?’
‘No, but it’s amazing what interesting items you can find out here and what they’ll fetch in the auctions on Coram, and it beats subsumption every time,’ replied Thirteen.
‘I don’t have to be wary of that. I’m a freed drone. I worked off my construction fees and indenture centuries ago. If I want to become part of the Warden, I can. I don’t want to, yet.’
‘Planting stealth mines on Prador dropbirds was how you paid your way out, as I recollect. You consider that a worthwhile pastime? Some of us are not so inclined to the martial occupation. Perhaps you should try subsumption at least once, it’d straighten out a few of your kinks.’
‘I’ve got kinks?’ Sniper paused for a moment. ‘What interesting items?’
‘Amberclam pearls, fossilized glister shell. I even found a vein of green sapphire once,’ replied Thirteen.
‘You never told me about this before,’ said Sniper.
‘Well, after the trouble I got into through snatching thrall units for you, I thought it best to keep quiet for a while.’
After a contemplative silence Sniper said, without heat, ‘We gonna count these fucking snails or what?’
The little drone turned towards Sniper with light glinting in its amber eyes, then it turned its nose and tilted it in the direction of one side of the atoll.
‘I’ll go this way round and you go the other. We’ll meet on the other side. This is the last one in sector fifty-two, then we can move on to fifty-three, which should be more interesting. There’s molly carp there.’
‘Oh joyful day,’ said Sniper. ‘You know why the Warden wants this census?’
‘The way I got it was “A study to assess the long-term impact of runcible heat pollution and on which to base any future plans for environmental restructuring”.’
‘Make-work,’ said Sniper, drifting down to the surface of the sea and lowering his back two legs into the water. The scanning probes in his feet now operating, he slowly began to trawl around the atoll. A subprogram he was running, now counted hammer whelks and catalogued them according to size and species. Sniper then ran one of his military programs to work out the minimum size of charge required to smash certain shells and kill their occupants. He did not test his theories until SMI3 was out of sight. The trail of small underwater explosions the war drone left behind him was also undetectable. Five hours later, the two drones met on the other side of the atoll.
‘You know, I don’t get why you came here to work with the Warden,’ said Thirteen, as they cruised on to pastures new.
‘Easy enough. I wanted to spend time on a Line world like this: more chance of some sort of action. Nothing’s got out of hand in the Polity for a long time now, and things are boringly peaceful. The few Separatist actions are normally flattened by ECS agents before there’s any need to deploy war drones.’
Below them the water was the colour of jade, fractured by the occasional white wake from some cruising sea leviathan. The sky was a lighter green shading to blue, and steel-grey clouds held the setting sun as if in a broken pewter vessel. Sniper remembered a day when, above seas very like this, he had been engaged in hunting down two inferior Prador war drones. They had been of old utile design: just flattened spheres of armour wrapped around an AG unit, a mind, and magazines for the antipersonnel guns they had welded underneath. Such was the way of things: when a technology had been taken to its limit of efficiency and utility, you could make it look pretty. This flying brooch next to him was definitely one of the latest examples of that. But those Prador war drones had not reached that point.
Still with a feeling of satisfaction, Sniper remembered catching both Prador drones against the cliff face where they had been hiding. He had spent an hour carefully herding them until he could take them both out with one high-penetration missile. Of course, no one but himself had appreciated the poetry of that moment. The humans and big-fuck AIs running the clean-up operation had posited it as yet another example of Sniper’s flagrant individualism during organized conflict. Sniper had always been the odd one out — from when his mind had been incepted by a dying AI warship, up to and including his choice of a body-shape that scared the shit out of most humans.
‘You’re ugly inside and out, AI,’ said a man who had been passing information to the Prador, just before Sniper had snipped his head off.
‘Remembering the good old days?’ said Thirteen.
‘Yeah,’ said Sniper, and then began to hum a tune.
‘What’s that?’ asked Thirteen.
‘“Ugly Duckling”,’ said Sniper then, gesturing ahead with its heavy claw, continued, ‘That one ain’t on the map.’
Surrounded by white water was a grey atoll poking out of the sea like the head of a man tilted to one side.
‘Shit,’ said Thirteen.
Out of habit, Sniper studied the little drone to try and read its expression, but obviously to no effect. That use of an expletive had been very un-submindish, but then SM13 had not been subsumed by the Warden for quite a while, the last time being when it had been caught snatching thrall units from the shore of one of the Segre Islands. Contemplating this, the war drone followed Thirteen down when it changed course to sweep in around the atoll.
‘Packet-worm coral,’ said the little drone. ‘Must have been shoved up in the last year.’
The edifice had the appearance of something on the facia of a Hindu temple, only subtly distorted until nothing was recognizably complete, just a wormish depiction of indefinable life: limbs and bodies chaotically tangled in organic stone.
‘This mean another census?’ asked Sniper.
‘It does. We have to count whelks around every above-surface structure — that’s what the Warden said.’
‘Great, I really look forward to it.’
‘Of course,’ said Thirteen, a laser projecting from its neck ridges to flash a gridded overlay on areas of the atoll, ‘this structure is unstable. You note how top-heavy it is and how the sea is wearing through that edge lower down?’
‘Yeah, I see it,’ said Sniper.
‘Not long before it collapses back into the sea, really.’
Sniper tilted in midair, smiled, and spat two cylinders from his square mouth. The cylinders slammed downwards drawing black lines through the air, and hit into the sea under the edge of the atoll. Underneath, the sea was lit by two deep-red detonations before spuming into the air in a globular cloud. The atoll lurched sideways and with a growing hiss it slid into the waves. Water flooded into the remaining hollow and all around the sea went opaque with disturbed silt.
‘Now that is what I call environmental restructuring,’ said Thirteen.
‘Drone bonding, as I neither live nor breath,’ said Sniper, and they flew on.
Erlin leant on the rail shading her eyes against the green sunlight as she studied the distant shapes on the sea. When she heard someone come up behind her, she expected to see Captain Ron — but it was Janer. She checked to see if he was carrying his weapon, since she’d found, over the short period they had been on board, that he tended to forget it. He grinned at her, drew his QC laser from his utility belt, spun it round his forefinger, and then holstered it again. She shook her head and gazed out to sea.