‘War drones,’ he ordered, ‘head for the island. Attack all my enemies. Do not cease till you destroy them all.’
‘We will kill the old drone,’ one of them promised.
‘As you will, but you will not return.’
A message began coming back, but Ebulan disconnected. The screens began to white-out, but he kept his attention fixed on them as the chamber’s sliding doors reopened and numerous hard sharp legs clattered on the flooring. As the doors shut, he slowly turned.
‘Second-children,’ he greeted the four adolescent Prador arrayed on the opposite side of the room — then he turned slightly towards the doors. There came two loud clumps as their locking systems engaged.
‘Father, what do you want of us?’ asked one of the second-children, slightly larger than the rest.
Ebulan’s AG hummed as he tilted and slid forwards rapidly. The four of them scattered, but he pinioned two of them against the wall. They both let out a siren wail as he rammed his huge carapace into them. One after the other, their shells collapsed with a dull liquid thud, their wailing died off in hissing gurgles. Ebulan now levelled and backed off, with pieces of broken shell and ichor clinging to his scalloped rim. He slowly turned to the other two, who were scrabbling desperately at the door.
‘There is no escape for traitors,’ he said.
‘We did nothing! It wasn’t us!’ the two screamed together.
Ebulan slid towards them. He’d catch one of them in his mandibles this time. It had been a while since he had tasted juvenile flesh.
The blank with fleshless legs tried standing yet again, and fell over yet again. A shadow passed over him, but he was oblivious to it as he tried to rise for perhaps the fiftieth time. As the shadow passed over him a second time, he was jerked into the air with a snapping crunch. This time he collapsed to the sand minus his head, and did not try to get up again.
After it had crunched a couple of times more and spat out a mess of bone, flesh, and thrall unit, the sail dropped the Captain on the beach
‘Thanks!’ Drum yelled as the sail’s wings took it booming off over the island. Turning his attention to the hideously mutilated corpse on the sand, he aimed the weapon he had brought, and fired at it once. Violet fire flashed with a sucking boom, and Drum staggered back. When his vision cleared, he found that all that remained of the blank were scattered fragments of burning flesh, and a quickly dispersing cloud of oily smoke. Thoughtfully he adjusted a slide control on the side of his weapon then turned to look out to sea.
The Ahab was completely gone. The ship he had sailed on for a hundred and fifty years, and owned for a hundred of those, was now a wreck at the bottom of the sea, and soon, he knew from all he’d overheard, it would be less even than that.
‘Payback time,’ he muttered, and, as if in reply to this threat, a giant flashbulb went off under the sea and the beach shifted.
‘Shit,’ said Drum, as before him the water began to bulge. Then the bulb went off again, and for a few seconds the sea turned red as far as the horizon. He turned and ran into the dingle.
Their trail ahead was easy to follow, as inevitably the Prador had flattened foliage as it progressed. Drum leapt a broken tree and kept moving as fast as he could. From behind him now came a deep rumbling, and he felt further tremors. Leeches fell from the trees and he snatched them off as he ran on. Ahead of him, the dingle began to thin and he was relieved to see the ground sloping upwards. The tremors now settled to a deep and continuous vibration. Drum emerged from under the trees just as an explosive wind struck. It hurled him on his face in spherule grass, while it blasted leaves and branches and even leeches past him. The force of the wind even slid him further along the ground.
As it began to ease off, he stood again and ran up the slope, slipping and sliding on the broken grass. As he reached the brow of the hill, the wave hit.
The flood climbed the beach and flattened the dingle. To one side Drum saw a ship flung inland that he instantly recognized as the Treader. He wasn’t high enough for safety, yet there was nowhere to run now but down the other side. A two-metre-deep torrent of seawater caught him halfway down the far slope and tumbled him the rest of the way. For a moment, he was tempted to release hold of his weapon and swim for it. Instead, he curled himself in a ball around it, and let the flood take him.
‘What the hell was that?’ said Janer. ‘This a volcanic island?’
Peck managed just a bubbling sound, his broken bones moving about under his skin. The Captains, Ambel and Ron, both watched as the lights faded from the sky, then Ambel made another attempt at relocating Ron’s dislocated shoulder. It finally slid into place with a muted thud.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Ron, wincing and rubbing at his injured joint. ‘But we got problems enough of our own.’ He went over to his machete and gingerly picked it up. Inspecting its sprine-coated edge, he nodded with satisfaction.
‘What about you?’ Ambel asked Peck loudly, as if talking to someone hard of hearing.
In his bed of foliage Peck tried to nod in response, then stopped immediately when the bones in his neck crunched. He sat upright and reached to straighten his jawbone while Janer tried not to turn the other way. There was something really macabre about watching someone with so many broken bones still move about. After he’d finished prodding his numerous fractures, Peck used his shotgun as a crutch to pull himself to his feet. Both his arms and one leg had not been broken: that was the best that could be said for his injuries.
‘Good lad,’ said Ambel, patting him carefully on the shoulder.
Peck tried nodding again, and pointed back the way they had come.
‘We’ll be back when we’ve seen the bugger dead,’ promised Ambel. ‘I’ll bring you a souvenir.’
‘We’re going after it?’ asked Janer.
‘Too right,’ said Ron.
‘But it’s been poisoned with sprine,’ said Janer.
‘Didn’t seem in a hurry to die though, did it?’ said Ambel.
Ambel and Ron headed for the entrance to the garden. Janer looked at Peck, who waved at him to follow them. At the entrance, he glanced back and saw Peck begin his limping progress back out of the Hoophold. Beyond the garden, Ambel took the lead, and Janer wondered what to make of that. Did the Old Captain remember something of his own time here?
Shortly, the three came round to the other side of the wall over which the Skinner had scrambled. From there, its further course was only too obvious. It had ripped right through another wall into a courtyard, on the other side of which was a high tunnel leading straight into the thick dingle. By Janer’s estimation, they were now on the opposite side of the Hoophold to where they had entered. He followed Ambel and Ron through the tunnel to where the Skinner had opened a path of destruction through the dingle itself.
‘Should be easy enough to follow him now,’ said Ambel.
Ron gave him a look, but reserved comment as they moved on in.
Vrell watched the flood subsiding in the dingle, then shifted his attention in the opposite direction. The island was large but that did not matter. Vrell had all the time he needed to track down the four of them: Frisk, Balem, Ron and Hoop. No one would be coming to rescue them, now that the Old Captains were all dead. Vrell began to contemplate his dismal future. If he did not get killed during this hunt, then he must kill himself so as not to become a danger to his father. This seemed his only option, though at that moment Vrell was beginning to wonder why his father could not come and rescue him. Having been separate from the normal domination of his father’s pheromones for some days, Vrell was even beginning to have thoughts he had never entertained before, and to brood somewhat more about the fairness of things. He also could not help thinking about his harem mothers, and that too elicited some strange feelings. On top of everything else, his back pair of legs felt loose. Perhaps it was these upsets to his equilibrium that made Vrell less observant.