‘Fuck you!’ she shouted at the monster.
‘Face Death, and know it as the enemy,’ spoke a voice, as wings boomed above her and shadows occluded the darkening sky. Then long-fingered claws gripped her shoulders and hauled her up into the firmament.
The juvenile glister, being small and necessarily opportunist, had been waiting in the depths for just such a moment, its antennae up as it ascertained that the giant whelk had definitely gone ashore. It rose up onto its multitude of legs, flicked its tail, and just gently touching the bottom with its sharp feet, bounced along towards the brood of young whelks. It came from down-current, and its camouflaged carapace gave it added advantage. Every time a stalked eye swung towards it, it changed its buoyancy, dropped to the bottom and froze. When it was close enough it gave a powerful flick of its flat tail and came down on the nearest whelk. The glister closed its claws in the flesh directly below the whelk’s shell before the creature had time to draw in its tentacles and the main mass of its body. The rest of the whelks immediately withdrew into their shells, but the glister had enough here—it was not greedy. It dragged its prey clear of the others, and with one claw remaining clamped into its flesh so the creature still could not escape, began tearing away lumps of it and feeding. The whelk thrashed at the glister with its tentacles, but those tentacles had not yet gained the concrete consistency of its parent’s. Its eye-stalks slapped from side to side until the glister snipped them off with its free claw and fed them into its mandibles. Soon it was into the guts of the thing, discarding the long serrated beak, sucking in loops of intestine. Then abruptly its antennae flicked upright as it detected something else in the water. It dropped the shell, despite it still containing plenty of flesh, pushed itself off from the bottom and swam away just as fast as it could. The problem it had always found, with dining on the sea bottom, was the uninvited guests.
The turbul shoal, forever patrolling the depths—feeding and being fed upon—their outer flesh constantly needing to be replaced, were always hungry. The scent of ichor in the water drove them to a frenzy with half-remembered feasting on the contents of easily broken shells. However, the still-present other scent from the giant whelk itself reminded them of near escapes, the loss of outer flesh and sudden reductions in their number.
The first turbul nosed cautiously up out of the depths—a long five-hundred-kilogram creature with caiman jaws and bright blue fins grown seemingly at random from its cylindrical dark green body. It sucked the water in through its nostrils, blowing it out through the gill holes down its length, flicked its whip tail, the hatchet fin on the end of that dislodging rocks down the slope behind it, and came on. Ahead of it the infant whelks again extruded eye-stalks and tentacles to test the water, immediately became agitated and drew closer together. The turbul circled, joined by others of its shoal. Then it shot in.
The whelks immediately retracted excrescences they had been cautiously easing out again, and sucked down hard on the bottom. The turbul clamped its jaws closed on the shell of one near the brood’s edge, wriggled its long heavy body and tugged the creature from the bottom. A few metres up it released the creature, arched its body, and slammed its tail fin into shell. The blow nearly cut the whelk in half and the turbul began champing down its tender flesh, the water growing cloudy about it.
The others began to attack now, then the whole shoal hit. It was as if someone had detonated an underwater mine. Silt and ichor exploded in every direction; iridescent shell drifted down through the water. Long heavy bodies rolled and thrashed. Whelks were jerked through all this, shattered and torn apart. Half an hour later the shoal began to lose interest and drift away, but now prill and leeches swarmed in to snap up what remained. In another half-hour they were gone. All that remained was a mess of glittering shell, and even that gleam disappeared as the silt settled down to shroud it.
Hovering on AG, Sniper watched the Island of Chel being slowly revealed by the morning sun. Below him geodesic domes nestling in the spreading sprawl of the Hooper town were licked by the yellow-green glare. The dingle surrounding this settlement was cut through by numerous paths, shadowy now, and many wide plascrete roads had been built. One extended from the greatly enlarged docks to branch into the town, another stretched in from the floating shuttle platforms. There were vehicles down there: wheeled cars and transports. Windcheater’s rules concerning antigravity transport now prevented the use of AG taxis between the platforms and domes and anywhere else on the island and, for that matter, on the planet. The rules did not apply to him or the other drones, however. Windcheater liked them—did not mind them up in his air.
A shuttle rose from the platforms, not a flying wing but a long flattened cylinder with thruster nacelles to the rear. It rotated in mid-air, aiming for the horizon, and then its motors ignited, their glare matching the rising sun. Watching it go, the old war drone keyed into the Warden’s com frequencies, glad to see that the AI had not yet found the covert programs he had left in place. Sniper could now listen in to secret communications, but for how long that would last he did not know. It would end as soon as the AI changed its frequency codings.
As he had guessed, the shuttle was a planetary one that Windcheater allowed to transport reifications to Mortuary Island. He was just about to shut off the link when he picked up some unusual traffic between the Warden and numerous sources below. One particular exchange riveted his attention.
‘He came through while you weren’t yet back in charge here,’ said a voice from the main dome. ‘We were tracking him aboard some private ship concerns and expected him to join the Gurnard, where our agents could have apprehended him. Turns out that lead was a dead end. He in fact used the runcible network long before. We since traced his journey through five jumps from Earth.’
‘Don’t you think you should have informed Sniper?’ the Warden asked.
‘My instructions were to keep this from him. It’s a touchy situation and apparently Sniper is not that good at being diplomatic.’
‘Agreed, but perhaps diplomacy is not what’s required here.’
‘I’m just following orders.’
‘So you’ve lost this individual now?’
‘Seems that way. He walked out of the Metrotel leaving his luggage behind him and just never came back. My agents are scouring the island but there seems no sign of him.’
‘Yes, I’m receiving their reports now.’
‘He could have gone into the sea. That’d be no problem for one like him.’
The Warden replied, ‘I think you overestimate Polity technology and underestimate the dangers of the deeps.’
Sniper spun, in his frustration, like a silver coin. Who or what were they talking about? The answer was provided by yet another communication between one of those agents and the Warden.
‘We’ve scanned the Trancept Arcade. No sign of that signal and no one has eyeballed the Golem. Chelar released a cloud of micro-eyes in there, so if he puts in an appearance we’ll be on him in a second.’
Submind Seven, not so ebullient now his master was back in control, replied, ‘Check the concourse now. You got nothing on secondary emitters?’
‘No—there must be hundreds of them all over the planet, smuggled in over the last few years. The primary U-space transmitter could be anywhere in the vicinity of the planet—supposing there’s only one of them—or it might be encoded through the runcible itself.’