The Skinner

‘The mind wants a look around,’ he explained.

One hornet shot off over the sea while the other buzzed around the ship. The crew ignored the insects yet the sail was instantly curious; raising its head from the deck and tracing the progress of the hornet that had remained with the ship.

‘Knowing that insects don’t live long here I wonder why the mind had you come,’ said Erlin.

‘Now there’s a question,’ said Janer.

‘One, I take it, that you asked?’

‘Oh yes. I ask the mind all sorts of questions, and in return I get all sorts of answers. Not always the answers I’m after, though.’

‘Could these hornets be… different?’ Erlin asked.

Janer was thoughtful for a moment as he gazed in the direction of the hornet that had flown off over the sea.

‘They don’t live very long as individuals,’ he said. ‘These two are new ones — replaced before they should have been.’ He tilted his head and listened. Erlin did not interrupt the unheard conversation that was obviously taking place. After a moment, he turned to her again.

‘Altered,’ he said.

Erlin nodded. Hive minds had no compunction about such things. There were stiff penalties for killing hornets, but they did not apply to minds killing their own hornets. This would, after all, be like imposing a penalty on a human for killing a few of his own brain cells. She looked at the hornet buzzing round the ship and noted how much attention the sail was still giving it.

‘The crew know about hornets, but the sail doesn’t,’ she said.

‘It will learn,’ said Janer, uninterested, as he again took his intensifier from his belt and raised it to his eyes.

Later that day the sail did learn, when it snapped at the passing hornet. It howled and rolled itself up to the top of the mast. The crew spent the rest of the day trying to coax it down again.

This time, the humped shape in the water was no drifting mass of sargassum, but a living creature in search of prey. It was ten metres long and, judging by its girth of only a couple of metres, it had not fed in some time. On its glistening ribbed back rode prill as hungry as itself. Theirs was a parasitic relationship. When the giant leech attached to prey, the prill swarmed on to it as well to slice off lumps of meat with their sickle legs. When the leech had fed and was therefore unlikely to pursue more prey, the prill went in search of another mount. Ambel had his blunderbuss resting on his shoulder as he gazed out at the creature. The rest of his crew had armed themselves again.

‘Bugger ain’t picked us up,’ said Peck, and immediately the leech turned and started heading for the Treader.

‘I wish you’d keep your bloody mouth shut,’ said Boris, rolling one end of his walrus moustache between forefinger and thumb, before taking a firmer grip on the helm.

‘We may as well take this one,’ said Ambel. ‘It’s not going to leave us alone.’

His crew-members looked up at him dubiously, then A

‘Pland, up here at the helm!’ Ambel shouted. Pland dropped the harpoon he had been weighing and scuttled to obey. Boris released the helm to him and quickly moved to the deck ca

‘Keep us just ahead, nice and easy,’ Ambel said, hefting his blunderbuss and sighting it on the back of the leech. The crash of the ‘buss was shockingly loud and it released a great gout of smoke. Three prill exploded into fragments. Others fell from the back of the leech then swam to catch up with it.

‘Boris!’ Ambel bellowed, and the deck ca

After lashing the helm, Pland looked down as one prill clattered on to the deck. The creature was the size of a di

‘Ah yer bugger!’ was the limit of Pland’s exclamation when a prill jammed one of its sickle legs into his thigh. He knocked it down on to the deck and, before it could recover, kicked the creature into the rail where Ambel got it on the rebound and stamped it to slurry — before turning to another balancing on the rail and punching it from the ship. Just then, Boris had managed to reload the deck ca

‘Ahah!’ Boris yelled and frantically set about ramming another powder charge down the spout, followed by handfuls of stones.

‘We’re wi

‘Boris! You bloody idiot!’ yelled Pland.

‘What!’ shouted Ambel, turning from another pool of quivering slurry.

‘He got two o’the ropes!’ yelled Pland.