They continued to gaze into the hole, and Janer even thought he caught the glint of eyes looking back out.

‘We could bury it in there,’ Janer suggested.

Ambel shook his head. ‘It’d only dig its way out again. Just one thing for it.’ With the power of a machine he stooped, gripped rock, and broke it away from the edge of the hole, then reached down for more. There was a tenacity in the Captain Janer found a little difficult to comprehend.

‘Why wasn’t the sprine killing the head too?’ he asked.

‘Had never fully connected itself. I wounded the body,’ said Ambel, still relentlessly pulling away rock. Janer watched him a while longer, then removed his own backpack, extracting from it the hexagonal box. He couldn’t help feeling a certain inevitability about this moment.

‘I have a way we can kill it,’ he said. ‘All I need is a crystal of sprine.’

‘At last,’ breathed the Hive mind.

* * * *

Ebulan reached out with rigid control, and Pilot touched and manipulated the various complex controls to start AG and warm the thrusters. Through another blank, the Prador put the weapons console online and checked the loads. All readings were optimum. The rear nacelles contained a hundred and forty-four missiles fitted with CTDs, as well as cluster and planar explosives. There were four defence lasers and two giga-joule particle beams. Even the old rail-guns were in perfect order, and had carousels full of ceramo-carbide missiles that could be fired at half the speed of light.

Meanwhile other blanks were running on the slave programs loaded into their thrall units, maintaining the ship, or standing ready to replace Pilot or the blank seated at the weapons console, all ready and equipped with hull patches and fire retardants, should the ship be hit.

The Prador destroyer rose out of the trench spilling an accumulation of silt and broken shell from its upper surfaces. It rose past heirodonts pausing in the depths for one brief respite in their painful lives, till finally it came up underneath an island of sargassum. As it rose it hauled up tonnes of seaweed with it, so that leeches and prill cascaded about it in organic rain. For a short while the hull matched the colour and texture of the floating mass of seaweed, then a line of fire traversed the ship, from its sensor arrays to its rear thrusters. Weed exploded from the armoured hull and fell flaming into the sea. Clouds of superheated steam were blasted away, then recondensed in an expanding cloud as the destroyer began to move. As it tilted, the sea below it flattened, then three evenly spaced thrusters blasted ribbed blue flames, and with a crash the destroyer accelerated into the sky.