"Wow!" she said, sitting back and looking pleased with herself. "Aloof!"

4 Dependency Principle

I

[tight beam, M16.4, rec. @n4.28.856.4903]

xGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The

oEccentric Shoot Them Later

Is it just me, or does something smell suspicious about all this?

oo

[tight beam, M16.4, tra. @n4.28. 856. 6883]

xEccentric Shoot Them Later

oGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The

Oh good, an easy one; it's you.

oo

I'm serious. This feels… strange.

oo

How dare you imply I'm not serious.

Anyway; what's the problem?

This is the most important thing ever, by our understanding.

Naturally everything and everybody will seem a little odd after such a realisation.

We cannot help but be affected.

oo

You're right, I'm sure, but I just have this niggling feeling.

No; the more I think about it the more I'm convinced you are right and I am worrying over nothing.

I'll do a little checking for my own peace of mind, but I'm sure it will only help lay my fears to rest.

oo

You should spend more time in Infinite Fun Space, you know.

oo

You're probably right. Oh well.

oo

Still, keep in touch.

Just in case anything does turn up.

Of course.

Take care.

oo

Good checking, my friend.

You take care, too.

II

The drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 drifted, waiting. Several seconds had passed since the skein pulse had resonated around it and it was still trying to decide what to do. It had passed the time by throwing together the anti-matter reaction chamber as best it could in the short time available, instead of painstakingly putting it together bit by delicate bit. As an after-thought, it released all but one of its nanomissiles and stuck two hundred of them around its heat-scarred rear panel in two groups on either side of the reaction chamber; fortuitously, the panel's damaged surface made it easy for it to embed the tiny missiles so that only the last third of their millimetre-long bodies protruded from the panel. It kept the other thirty-nine missiles ready to fire, for all the good that would do against whatever it was stalking it.

The gentle, buzzing vibrations in the skein had taken on a distinctive signature; something was coming towards it in hyperspace, with a sensory keel in real space, trawling slowly, well below lightspeed. Whatever it was, it was not the Peace Makes Plenty; the timbral characteristics were all wrong.

A wash of wide-band radiation, like a sourceless light, a final pulse of maser energies, in real space this time, and then something shimmering away to one side; a ship surfacing into the three-dimensional void, image flickering once then snapping steady.

Ten kilometres away; one klick long. Matched velocity. A fat, grey-black ellipsoid shape, covered with sharp spines, barbs and blades…

An Affronter ship!

The drone hesitated. Could this have been the ship that had been following the Peace Makes Plenty! Probably. Had it been taken over by the artifact/excession? Possibly. Not that it mattered in the end. Shit.

The Affront; no friends of the Elench. Or anybody else, for that matter. I've failed. They'll reel me in, gobble me up.

The drone tried desperately to work out what it could do. Did the fact it was an Affronter ship make any real difference? Doubtful. Should it signal it, try to get it to help? It could try; the Affront were signatories to the standard conventions on ships and individuals in distress and in theory they ought to take the drone aboard, help repair it and broadcast a warning about the artifact to the rest of the galaxy.

In practice they would take the drone to bits to find out how it worked, drain it of all its information, ransom it if they hadn't destroyed it in the process of investigation and inquisition, probably try to put a spy-program into it so that it would report back to them once it was back amongst the Elench, and meanwhile try to work out how they could use the artifact/excession, perhaps being foolhardy enough to attempt investigating it in the same final, fatal way the Peace Makes Plenty had, or perhaps keeping it secret for now and bringing more ships and technology to bear upon it. Almost certainly the one thing they wouldn't do was play the situation by the book.

EM effector; communicating. Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 readied its shields, for as much as that was worth; probably delay proceedings by, oh, a good nanosecond if the Affronter ship decided to attack it…

— Machine! What are you?

(Well, that was spoken like an Affronter, certainly; it'd bet they hadn't tangled with the artifact/excession yet. Oh well. Play it by the conventions:)

— I am Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, drone of the Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Elench, and in distress, it communicated. ~ And you?

— You are ours now. Surrender or take flight!

(Definitely still 100 % Affront.)

— Sorry, I missed that. What did you say your name was again?

— Surrender at once or take flight, wretch!

— Let me think about that.

(And thinking was exactly what it was doing; thinking hard, thinking feverishly. Stalling for time, but thinking.)

— No!

The effector signal strength started to soar exponentially. It had plenty of time to slam down its shields.

Bastards, it thought. Of course; they like a chase…

The drone fired the missiles embedded in its rear panel; the two hundred tiny engines brought unequal amounts of matter and anti-matter together and threw the resulting blast of plasma boiling into the vacuum, careening the machine away across space directly away from the Affronter craft. The acceleration was relatively mild. The drone had no time to test the anti-matter reaction chamber it had constructed; it threw a few particles of each sort into the chamber and hoped. The chamber blew up. Shit; back to the drawing board.

Not much damage — not much extra damage, anyway — but not much extra impetus either, and it wouldn't be using the chamber again. The acceleration went on, building slowly. What else? Think!

The Affronter ship didn't bother to set off in pursuit of the drone; Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 dropped its plan of leaving a few nanomissiles scattered like mines behind it. (Who am I trying to kid, anyway? Think; think!)

Space seemed to buckle and twist in front of it, and suddenly it was no longer heading straight away from the Affronter ship; it was parallel to it again. Those animal pus-bags are playing with me!

A flicker from near the Affronter ship's nose. A centimetre-diameter circle of laser light blinked onto the drone's casing and wavered there. The drone instructed the nanomissile engines to shut off and flicked on its mirror shields; the laser beam tracked it unsteadily and narrowed until it was a millimetre in diameter, then its power suddenly leapt by seven orders of magnitude. The drone coned its protesting mirrorfield and turned rear-on to the ship again, presenting the smallest possible target. The laser modulated, stepping up to the ultraviolet. It started strobing.

Playing with me, just fucking playing with me… (Think! Think!)

Well, first…

It popped the clamps around its two upper-level minds and raised the bit of its casing that would let the two components — AI core and photonic nucleus — free. The casing shuddered and grated, but it moved. Once it was clear of the main casing, the drone nudged the two mind components with its maniple field. Nothing happened. They were stuck.