There were no probes in the area, so Ebulan dispatched the nearest one of them available. This same probe - built in the shape of a small Prador, with thrusters shell-welded underneath - burst from the sargassum where it had been squatting and rocketed up into the sky, then went hypersonic for twenty seconds before shutting down its thrusters and coasting to the edge of the tsunami. To Ebulan it returned an image of the fleet of ships riding the swells behind the initial huge wave, their sails belled to bursting. Maybe one or two of them had been sunk, but no more - the CTD concealed inside the Ahab had not been close enough to cause any real damage. The probe then transmitted back the information that objects were now approaching it at hypersonic speeds. This transmission was abruptly curtailed as the probe became an incandescent cloud of metal vapour.

Ebulan crashed around his chamber, in increasing anger, and it was some time before he could think clearly again. Vrell would soon be in the process of making the change, so would be useless to him now. The pheromones that kept a fully limbed Prador in a state of adolescence until the father of the family died were not present where the adolescent now was, and because the ‘change’ had been suppressed in it for so long, Vrell would make the transformation to adulthood very quickly.

The blanks out there might still be of some use if he dared reconnect their control boxes, but he did not. He did not want again to risk feeling the pain from their bodies. They never felt it as, though having nervous systems, they had no brains to understand the signals from them - he was the one with the brain. Their thrall units were the nearest things they possessed to intelligence, and those devices merely translated verbal orders to action, or acted as the interface between the blank’s nervous system and its controlling Prador mind.

No blanks, no Vrell, and no second-children either. Perhaps the war drones, then? Ebulan spun round and slid up to his array of screens. He used the control box of the blank he had cut in half earlier to try to link through. The whited-out screens threw up nothing but static. The drones had to be all dead?