‘Loop round,’ said Twelve. ‘We’ll go in from the side this time.’

‘Yeah, and with that you’ll achieve what?’

‘Prador war drone approaching from the east!’ yelled Seven.

‘It was a Prador war drone, but now it’s me.’

‘Sniper, is that you?’ asked Twelve.

‘Isn’t that what I just said?’ replied Sniper.

The old war drone had now become an amalgam of dented Prador drone with a headless aluminium crayfish attached to its surface and linked to the inside, through the split, via a fountain of optic cables.

Sniper went on, ‘Dispersed and more difficult target, my arse. That Prador is playing with you. While it appears that you might be doing some damage, it knows there’s less chance of anything else being sent against it. Otherwise you’d all be scrap by now.’

‘What would you suggest?’ asked Twelve.

‘I don’t suggest. I’m telling you that a dispersed attack is going to do nothing to affect that armour. You need to go in randomly and concentrate on just one point. Go for something vulnerable: a sensor array or a thruster. Now do it!’

Twelve bowed to Sniper’s experience, and the formation broke as it hurtled back in towards the ship, the drones weaving all over the sky as lasers tried to pick up on them almost with a casual indifference.

‘Seven to Ten, concentrate everything you have on that port thruster,’ sent Sniper. ‘One and Two, once they hit it, you hit the port laser with your rail-guns. Twelve, you’ve only got a geological laser - so why the hell are you here?’

‘As a distraction?’ Twelve suggested.

‘Yeah, if you like,’ said Sniper.

‘Where are you going?’ Twelve asked, noticing that Sniper was receding into the sky.

‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back before you know it. Or, rather, back before our friend in that ship knows it.’

The SMs shot in over the destroyer and their missiles spread like a cloud of gnats around it. Everything seemed random until the cloud suddenly closed on the rear of the destroyer. A constant stuttering explosion bloomed, and the casing of a thruster went incandescent. The destroyer tilted as if a giant hand had slapped its back end - but then it quickly corrected. Shortly after that, there was a flash of purple fire, and an extrusion on the front of the Prador ship suddenly blackened and cracked open. Directly on top of that a luminous green line stabbed up from the destroyer and something danced before it, flickered, and became just a line of dust in the sky.

‘There went Seven,’ said Two.

‘Particle beam,’ observed Nine - then, ‘EM shells!’

Twelve flew over the top of the ship, through a wall of fire. It could do nothing: its little geological laser, had it even been working, could not have touched this Prador armour. As it passed through the fire, Twelve closed its cockle-shells and tumbled through the air, as the EM pulse knocked its AG controls out of sync. Correcting at the last moment, it noted the crash foam inside itself melting, and that the casing on its micro-pile was developing hairline cracks.