Morning dragged into afternoon, and it was the next turn for Pland and Boris at the handles. The wheel was whirring around nicely, and the bile was just beginning to separate in the vessels. In the bottom half of each it lay thick and green, with a layer of cloudy fluid above it. When it came to Ambel’s turn, there was a thin layer of clear fluid at the surface. As he worked the handles some of the crew fished for boxies, and others went below to rest their aching limbs.

By mid-afternoon a centimetre of clear fluid rested at the top of each vessel. At this point Ambel released the handles and let the spinner wind to a stop. He called Peck over and together they siphoned this clear fluid into a smaller, open-topped vessel. This container they took into Ambel’s cabin to place in a secure framework he had earlier clamped to his desk. It wouldn’t do to lose all that work to the first squall that came along. The stuff remaining in the larger vessels, they tipped over the side.

‘Should be ready by tomorrow morning,’ Ambel stated.

‘Aye, the bugger,’ said Peck in the same grim tone that all of them had taken on this day. It was a serious business planning to kill something a thousand years old, no matter how evil it might be.

* * * *

SM12 scanned the three ships and found nothing to make it suspicious. It recognized the crews of each vessel, having come across them many times before in its travels. Completing its circuit of Tay’s island, it experienced dronish frustration. Where was she? The Batian’s deflated dinghy still lay under the sheet-leaves where they had beached and there had been no signs of any other landings on the other beaches. Nothing in the air either, so that left one choice. The iron cockle dropped out of the sky with the aerodynamics of a brick, entered the sea with a huge splash, and switched on its sonar. Immediately it picked up signs of movement all around it, but nothing with a metallic signature. It accelerated, kicking up a cloud of silt behind, and ran electrostatic scans for as far as it could. It really needed some help. Taking an instant decision, it shot out of the water and broadcast.

‘Where’s SM Thirteen?’ it asked.

‘SM Thirteen is hypersonic and will be with you directly,’ said the Warden. ‘You are having trouble locating Rebecca Frisk?’

‘Has to have gone into the sea. She’s not on the island,’ Twelve replied. It then dropped, and started scanning once again. It was soon tracing something it thought might be promising when there was a splash above it, and soon an iron seahorse was cruising along beside it.

‘Want a hand?’ asked Thirteen.

‘Yes, I’m on to something now,’ said Twelve.

‘You realize that hammer-whelk shells have a slight piezoelectric property?’ said Thirteen.