Captain Sergei Tchlinsky stood on the bridge of his ship, the Jaldysh, and watched the second hand of the clock creep round to the midnight position.

It had been a long duty shift, preoccupied with thoughts of his crew enjoying their shore leave in the bars of Nakhodka. Several times over the last few hours he'd stepped out on deck for a cigarette and swore he heard the sounds of their raucous merrymaking drifting over the port. It was a still, clear night.

Which was far removed from the recent storm they had run into at sea. The Jaldysh was docked for a couple of days for some minor repair work, so Captain Tchlinsky had given his crew some impromptu time off.

As he waited for the next duty officer, Tchlinsky heard raised voices and went out on deck. He looked over the side of the ship. Two of his ratings, both of them drunk, were urinating into the gap between the Jaldysh and the dock. The rest of the crew would return in a similar state, he didn't wonder, a few hours later. Except for the lucky ones - they would only be back in time for morning roll call.

Tchlinsky went back into the pilothouse and looked at the clock again. Two minutes late. His executive officer had sloppy timing. Tchlinsky was impatient. It had been a long time since he'd had any proper shore leave himself.

As he stood there, he felt the cushion of paper notes he'd folded and put in his pocket before the start of his shift. Once his replacement eventually showed up, he would head straight for a dark cellar-bar on the far side of town that he knew stayed open until 2am. The Jaldysh had docked in Nakhodka once before and Tchlinsky had made the acquaintance of a beautiful courtesan named Anastasia.

He couldn't bring himself to call her a whore.

It was four minutes past midnight when Tchlinsky heard footsteps coming toward the bridge. But it wasn't his executive officer that emerged from the passage, but a young rating, pasty-skinned, his uniform still new-looking.

"Where's Lieutenant Karnberg?"

"He sent me to come and find you, sir," the young rating said. He was one of a dozen men denied shore leave because the ship needed a skeleton crew to run. "He's waiting for you outside the hold. It's urgent, sir."

"Why? What's going on?"

"He says there's a disturbance, sir."

"What kind of disturbance?"

"An intruder, sir!"

Tchlinsky snorted at the prospect, feeling personally violated. "You stay here until either Karnberg or I return, understood?"

"Yes, sir. Of course, sir."

He gave a rigid salute as the captain left the bridge. Tchlinsky headed aft to the stairwell that would take him to the bottom of the ship.

As he tramped down the stairs, Tchlinsky wondered what his executive officer had been doing in the hold all this time. Karnberg had been sent to oversee the transfer of their cargo onto the back of a waiting freight truck, but that had been hours ago, at the start of Tchlinsky's duty shift. He'd watched from the deck as a crane winched the thing ashore, silhouetted against a gloomy October sunset.

Captain Tchlinsky reached the bottom of the stairs and started along the main passage, shoving pressure doors open with a hacking snort.

If he knew his second-in-command at all, the man would be making the most of finding an intruder - and giving them the hiding from hell. For recreation at shore leave time, Alexander Karnberg, who was a notorious non-drinker, liked nothing better than waiting until the ratings were vulnerably drunk, then provoking them into doing something worthy of a flogging; which he'd then duly administer.

The man would probably make captain one day.

But when Tchlinsky found him, his executive officer was hiding outside the hatch leading into the cargo bay, his back pressed against the wall, a petrified sweat rolling down his cheeks. Tchlinsky called to him.

Alexander Karnberg jumped.

"Captain, be quiet!" he hissed, accompanied by a forceful gesture to shut up that Tchlinsky would have taken issue with at any other time.

But he'd just heard the noise.

It sounded like there was an earthquake inside the hold, and as he got closer the noise just got louder. The door was open a sliver, and though he couldn't see inside, he could hear all the cracks, bangs and smashes.

"What the hell's going on in there?"

"I don't know what it is, sir. I only saw it for a split second, just before the lights went out. Captain, it killed two of our men!"

Something was suddenly thrown against the hatch, something heavy. They both jumped. The hatch slammed shut, and then the sounds were muffled.

"Right. That's it. Wait here."

When Tchlinsky returned, he brought two pistols with him. The armoury was just along the passage on this deck. He checked they were loaded.

"We shoot to kill," he told Karnberg, handing him a pistol. "This is a military vessel and judicial authority lies with the captain."

"Captain, these won't be enough."

"What are you talking about?"

Suddenly there was a loud, inhuman howl on the other side of the door. They both started. Then the banging and smashing returned, wilder than ever.

"Does that sound like a stowaway to you?"

Tchlinsky could see the whites of Karnberg's eyes. The man was terrified. His hands shook holding the gun. Perhaps Tchlinsky had been wrong about him.

He'd never make captain.

"We enter on three."

Karnberg gulped and nodded.

"One... two..."

Tchlinsky put his hand on the hatch.

"Three."

Then he shoved the hatch back open. They both stormed into the darkness of the cargo bay, guns aloft. In the second-hand light from the strip-lights in the passage, the captain saw the utter devastation that had been wreaked on the hold.

The Jaldysh was a destroyer, not a cruiser. It had one hold, about thirty feet long, which doubled as a weapons locker. Ammunition, food and medical supplies were packed in cube-shaped crates, which were stacked on top of each other. At this end of the hold, they remained stacked, forming tall walls with a maze of walkways between them. The crates at the far end - were gone.

Smashed open. Their contents - the ammunition, the food packages - strewn everywhere, atop a bed of shredded metal and shattered wood.

Tchlinsky spotted the two dead crewmen, buried beneath rubble. They looked twisted and broken like dolls, a few limbs dropped away from the rest.

The hold had fallen silent, but something moved in the semidarkness.

"Show yourself!" Tchlinsky ordered.

The intruder slipped quickly into the shadows, disappearing silently into the black at the far end of the hold. Tchlinsky walked forward.

"Fire at will!" he told Karnberg.

The lieutenant followed him. They left the protective enclosure of the cargo crates side by side and proceeded into the hold, firing liberally.

Tchlinsky didn't know what Karnberg was shooting for, but he was aiming in the direction the intruder had fled. And in the strobe-like flashes of their gunfire, he thought he saw the stowaway climb up the cargo bay wall.

No, glide up it - but that was impossible.

"My god, Karnberg, what is it?"

Suddenly there was a new light source. It was blue, blue baubles of rippling light, and they came from the intruder's elevated position.

It was only when one of them tore Karnberg's head off with an effortless splat that Tchlinsky realised it was a weapon, and dived for cover.

He landed on his front between two rows of intact crates, stacked to a height of about five feet. When he lifted his head up, one of the crates exploded into splinters of wood. He dropped the gun and wrapped his hands round his ears.

The intruder was still firing from on high. Tchlinsky saw two bolts fly overhead in quick succession, but they came from different angles. His attacker was moving along the wall toward him and soon it would be right above him.

Tchlinsky had to move, but there was hardly any room. If he stood up to turn round, he'd be shot. He pushed himself up on his palms, slicing them open. Then he began feeding himself back out into the walkway, feet first.

As soon as he felt his elbows free up to the sides, no longer confined in the narrow gap between crates, he hopped into a crouch.

He made it just in time. Just as he flipped himself out of the way, several bolts of the blue lightning careered through the space where he'd just been lying. Tchlinsky held an arm to his eyes as the adjacent crates blew apart on impact and he was showered with their contents. He shook the debris onto the floor.

Suddenly there were a couple of heavy thuds, a crack, and two more crates smashed open. The intruder had jumped down after him.

Almost deafened by his own heartbeat, Tchlinsky peered around the crates. In the gloom he saw the outline of the massive form, writhing amidst the crates that had broken its fall. The intruder tore them apart with ease.

Then the thing growled.

Tchlinsky couldn't move. It had sounded like that howl he'd heard from the other side of the hatch, just angrier, frustrated.

And it was still coming for him. Somehow it knew where he was. It was too big to slip through the narrow gap between the crates, so it was pulverising its way through them, and against his strength they seemed brittle like glass.

Tchlinsky knew he had to move, but if he ran the fifteen yards to the hatch, he'd have to cross his attacker's path. Maybe he could outrun it, his panicking brain thought, but he knew he couldn't outrun its weaponry.

Suddenly the crate right above his head exploded. Tchlinsky scrambled to his feet and slipped between the last two rows of intact crates. It took him further from the hatch, but further from his attacker too. There was a moment of silence as the thing reached the empty walkway, but then the crates all around Tchlinsky started popping apart. The thing was standing back, firing repeatedly.

Tchlinsky found he could go faster sideways on. He slipped through the maze, taking the sharp corners blind. The beast started smashing after him.

A crate right behind Tchlinsky's feet suddenly blew apart and the two stacked on top of it crumpled to the deck. The captain saw the hatch through this gap. He leapt between the crates as three red dots of light chased him across them.

As he charged the final few yards to the open hatch, the last row of crates ruptured with a cacophony. His neck felt scalded. He saw the bolt fly past out of the corner of his eye. It had missed by a fraction of an inch.

But something still made him stop in the passage.

It was a circular glass panel, unused so long the glass was misty, and the halo of green neon around it was dim. But Tchlinsky still knew what it did.

He just hoped the rating on the bridge did, too.

He smashed the panel with his fist, but just as he did so, one of the creature's bolts took off his kneecap. He fell to the floor, screaming, but his screams were drowned out by the wailing of the klaxon throughout the ship.

More bolts flew overhead. As Tchlinsky tried wriggling away along the passage, he realised falling down had probably saved his life.

Fortunately that pasty-skinned rating in the new-looking uniform knew exactly what to do when he heard the flood warning alarm.

Looking back, Tchlinsky saw the emergency watertight bulkhead chugging down into position over the hatch. But slowly, oh so slowly.

Tchlinsky also saw his lower leg lying beneath the hatch and his stomach turned. He hadn't even realised he'd lost it. His kneecap wound was perfectly cauterised. He felt no pain, but his head swam with the smell of cooked flesh.

He started slipping out of consciousness, but in the final few seconds before the bulkhead locked down into position, he saw the intruder burst through the remains of the last of the crates and thunder toward the passage.

Tchlinsky stared, aghast, as it ran into the descending column of light. He wouldn't say he stared into its face; it didn't seem to have one.

The beast let off a few more bolts, but it was too late. They all hit the other side of the bulkhead instead. For a moment, Tchlinsky thought he heard the thing hammering on the other side, but that bulkhead was designed to withstand an explosion, in case a torpedo hit the Jaldysh's stern. It was over six inches thick.

There was no way that monster was getting out of there.

Anton Malakov had once more expropriated the harbour master's office, and once more, Jack Shelby only got about four hours of sleep. The KGB agent stomped into the upstairs room shortly after 4am, waking his prisoner up.

"Get up. Get dressed. It's been captured."

"What?" He was still half-asleep.

"It attacked a ship in Nakhodka. The captain trapped it in the hold."

Shelby rubbed his sleep-sticky eyes. "How far?"

"About thirty miles down the coast."

"Wait. Thirty miles?"

"Yes. Come on." He pulled the covers off Shelby. The building had little in the way of insulation so Shelby slept in most of his clothes, and was still cold.

"If we leave now, we can be there by breakfast."

"Hang on a minute," Shelby protested, reclaiming the cover. "Are you sure it's our guy? Thirty miles is a long way to travel in what, twenty hours?"

Malakov stopped and looked at him. "You and your marine troupe managed it just fine." He paused. "And you weren't even invisible."

Shelby sighed. "Throw me my pants."

Leonid Brezhnev was not one for sleeping. He rarely slept for more than three hours a night, and despite claims by his physician that this was unhealthy, he felt fit and alert during the day. Indeed, he only started to feel lethargic when he wasn't doing anything. His bedroom was good only for fucking.

And as Brezhnev insisted to his physician, he was in good company. He'd read that Winston Churchill slept only three hours a night for the entire war. Someone else had told him that Napoleon Bonaparte rarely ever slept, and when he did, he always slept with one eye open, gripping his pillow tight. And look at how successful he had been; not even Hitler matched his achievements. Brezhnev had an unfounded suspicion that Adolf Hitler liked his duvet a little too much. He, on the other hand, sleeping as little as these greats, was clearly destined for great things.

Brezhnev usually rose between 2am and 3am, so was already up when there was a knock on his front door a couple of hours later. It was Vladimir Metzkin.

"What are you doing at my house at this hour, Metzkin?"

"There have been developments. Let me in."

So Brezhnev took him into the office and sat behind the desk whilst Metzkin told him about an attack on Vladivostok, and asked if he'd heard.

"No," Brezhnev told him.

"Exactly," said Metzkin.

Then he launched into a tirade against Marshal Gharkov, the head of the KGB, who Metzkin claimed was withholding crucial intelligence.

"He's a liability," he concluded.

"Gharkov is an obedient loyalist. If he's concealing a suspected American attack on one of our positions, then it is because Nikita has told him to."

"He needs to be removed."

"Stop champing at the bit, Metzkin. I trust Gharkov more than I do you. If this is the beginning of war, and Khrushchev covers it up, Gharkov will provide vital testimony of the Premier's inaction, and that can only bolster my position."

"But he's complicit in that inaction!"

Brezhnev sighed. He got up, opened a glass cabinet on the far side of the office and poured himself a small measure of vodka into a glass.

Metzkin's bird-like piercing eyes followed him across the room. "Tell him what we're planning, sir, then see where his loyalties lie."

"When Nikita falls, he will be loyal to me."

Metzkin didn't have much else to say. Said something about loyalty to the motherland being paramount, refused a drink, and then left.

After he'd gone, Brezhnev went back into the office and poured himself another vodka. As he drank it, he looked up at the clock. It was four o'clock in the morning. Metzkin must have thought he was destined for greatness, too.

We'll see about that, thought Brezhnev.

The hunter knew he was trapped.

He tried several times to blast his way through the door that had slid down after the human, but all he did was scorch the surface. It was made of a metal that was heat-resistant to a temperature far hotter than his cannon could muster.

He stalked around the chamber, methodically testing for weaknesses with his shoulder-cannon and his wrist-blades. But all that did was waste his dwindling energy reserves and blunt the sharp edges of the blades.

The hunter stood amidst the wreckage he had caused, lifted his arms toward a sky he couldn't see and howled out loud.

To his race, honour, pride and nobility were not abstract notions. They weren't just a creed to be followed, they were a matter of instinct. An instinct that could be honed, for sure, but something programmed into their brains from birth.

What this hunter felt was akin to shame.

But shame to his race was not just about failure and self-reproach, but a fearful acceptance that this meant certain death.

The hunter flipped a panel up on his arm. It was divided into four little sections. The broken green circle in the last section was still spinning wildly, as if one end was chasing the other. But the hunter ignored that now.

A few button-presses and he could initiate a countdown that would result in his immolation. He didn't want to, but he had to.

Yet as his long talon hovered over the panel, he suddenly had a thought. It wasn't something he was meant to do, but perhaps there was no shame in ingenuity. He snapped down the panel and took out his pouch of tools.

NOTES:
Another short chapter, but this one took the longest to write, taking over a week. As with the last chapter, something of a transition in where the story is heading, as the Predator is no longer hunting, yet I had to develop the mystery of just what it's up to if not hunting for sport. Originally I couldn't make it work. My usual solution to clunky plotting is just to complicate things, create more obstacles to be overcome. But that is only a superficial solution, because in stories like this, simpler is usually more effective. It's hard to be thrilled when you're utterly confused.

Tchlinsky was really scraping the barrel for Russian-sounding names. Karnberg actually sounds more German, I think. Anastasia was named for the daughter of the last Russian Tsar. Many people have come forward claiming to be her, despite the fact she was supposed to have been executed with the rest of her family in the Russian Revolution. As for the Jaldysh, I looked for a variety of Russian words, as I did Japanese words for the name of the Hitori, but all the Babel Fish-style translators returned the words using the Russian alphabet. So in the end I just changed a few letters from the Keldysh, which was the Russian ship that found the Titanic.

As for Brezhnev's recollection that Napoleon "slept with one eye open, gripping the pillow tight", I make no apologies, despite it being a terrible joke (it's a line from the pre-chorus of "Enter Sandman" by Metallica).