It also had a knack of turning up intriguing things – ancient artifacts, new civilisations, the mysterious remnants of Sublimed species, unguessably old depositories of antique knowledge – not all of which were of ultimate interest to the Elench itself, but many of which might excite the curiosity, further the purposes and benefit the informational or monetary funds of others, especially if they could get to them before anybody else. Such opportunities arose but rarely, but they had occurred sufficiently often in the past for certain societies of an opportunistic bent to consider it worth the expense or the bother of dedicating a ship to follow an Elencher craft, for a while at least, and so the Peace Makes Plenty had not been unduly alarmed by the discovery that it might be being tailed.
Two months in. And still nothing exciting; just gas clouds, dust clouds, brown dwarfs and a couple of lifeless star systems. All well enough charted from afar and displaying no sign of ever having been touched by anything intelligent.
Even the hint of the following ship had disappeared; if it ever had been real, the vessel concerned had probably decided the Peace Makes Plenty was not going to strike lucky this trip. Nevertheless, everything the Elencher ship came within range of was scanned; passive sensors filtered the natural spectrum for signs of meaning, beams and pulses were sent out into the vacuum and across the skein of space-time, searching and probing, while the ship consumed whatever echoes came back, analysing, considering, evaluating…
Seventy-eight days after leaving Tier, approaching a red giant star named Esperi from a direction which according to its records nobody had ever taken before, the Peace Makes Plenty had discovered an artifact, fourteen light months distant from the sun itself.
The artifact was a little over fifty kilometres in diameter. It was black-body; an ambient anomaly, indistinguishable from a distance from any given volume of almost empty interstellar space. The Peace Makes Plenty only noticed it at all because it occluded part of a distant galaxy and the Elencher ship, knowing that bits of galaxies did not just wink off and back on again of their own accord, had turned to investigate.
The artifact appeared to be either almost completely massless, or – perhaps – some sort of projection; it seemed to make no impression on the skein, the fabric of space-time which any accumulation of matter effectively dents with its mass, like a boulder lying on a trampoline. The artifact/projection gave the impression that it was floating on the skein, making no impression on it whatsoever. This was unusual; this was certainly worth investigating. Even more intriguingly, there was also a possible anomaly in the lower energy grid, which underlay the fabric of real space. There was a region directly underneath the three-dimensional form of the artifact that, intermittently, seemed to lack the otherwise universally chaotic nature of the Grid; there was a vaguest-of-vague hint of order there, almost as if the artifact was casting some sort of bizarre – indeed, impossible – shadow. Even more curious.
The Peace Makes Plenty hove to, sitting in front of the artifact – in as much as it could be said to have a front – and trying both to analyse it and communicate with it.
Nothing; the black-body sphere appeared to be massless and inviolable, almost as though it was a blister on the skein itself, as though the signals the ship was sending towards it could never connect with a thing there because all they did was slide flickering over that blister almost as though it wasn’t there and pass on undisturbed into space beyond; as though, trying to pick up.a stone that appeared to be resting on the surface of a trampoline, one discovered that the trampoline surface itself was bulged up to cover the stone.
The ship decided to attempt to contact the artifact in a more direct manner; it would send a drone-probe underneath the object in hyperspace, below the surface of space-time; effectively making a tear, a rent in the fabric of the skein – the sort of opening it would normally create to fashion a way into HS through which it could travel. The drone-probe would attempt, as it were, to surface inside the artifact; if there was nothing there but a projection, it would find out; if there was something there, it would presumably either be prevented from entering it, or accepted within. The ship readied its emissary.
The situation was so unusual the Peace Makes Plenty even considered breaking with Elench precedent by informing Tier habitat or one of its peers what was going on; the nearest other Stargazer craft was a month’s travel away, but might be able to help if the Peace Makes Plenty got itself into trouble. In the end, however, it stuck with tradition and kept quiet. There was a kind of stealthy pragmatism in this; an encounter of the sort the ship was embarking upon might only be successful if the Elencher craft could fairly claim to be acting on its own, without having made what might, to a suspicious contactee, look like a request for reinforcements.
Plus, there was simple pride involved; an Elencher ship would not be an Elencher ship if it started acting like part of a committee; why, it might as well then be a Culture ship!
The drone-probe was dispatched with the Peace Makes Plenty keeping in close contact. The instant the probe passed within the horizon of the artifact, it-
The records the drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 had access to ended there.
Something, obviously, had happened.
The next thing it personally knew, the Peace Makes Plenty had been under attack. The assault had been almost unbelievably swift and ferocious; the drone-probe must have been taken over almost instantaneously, the ship’s subsystems surrendered milliseconds later and the integrity of the ship’s Mind shattered within – at a guess – less than a second after the drone-probe had infringed the space beneath the artifact.
A few more seconds later and Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 itself had been involved in a last desperate attempt to get word of the ship’s plight to the outside galaxy while the vessel’s usurped systems did their damnedest to prevent it; by destroying it if necessary. The long-agreed, carefully worked-out ruse using itself and its twin and the preprogrammed independent Displacer unit had worked, though only just, and even so, with considerable damage to the drone that had been Sisela Ytheleus 2/2 and was now Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, with a kind of twisted remnant of Sisela Ytheleus 2/2 lodged within it.
The drone had carried out the equivalent of pressing an ear to the wall of the core with its twin’s mind in it, carefully accessing a meaning-free abstract of the activity inside the closed-off core to find out what was happening in there. It was like listening to a furious argument going on in an adjoining room; a chilling, frightening sound; the sort of bawling match that made you expect the sound of screams and things breaking, any moment.
Its original self had probably died in the process of escape; instead of its own body it now inhabited that of its twin, whose violated, defected mind-state now raged helplessly within the core labelled 2/2.
The drone, still tumbling through interstellar space at two hundred and eighty kilometres a second, felt a kind of revulsion at the very idea of having a treacherous, perverted version of its twin locked inside its own mind. Its first reaction was to expunge it; it thought about just dumping the core into the vacuum and wasting it with its laser, the one weapon which still seemed to be working at close to normal capacity; or it could just shut off power to the core, letting whatever was in it die for want of energy.
And yet it mustn’t; like the two higher mind components, the ravaged version of its twin’s mind-state might contain clues to the nature of the artifact’s own mind-type. It, the AI core and the photonic nucleus all had to be kept as evidence; retained, perhaps, as samples from which a kind of antidote to the artifact’s poisonous infectivity might be drawn. There was even a chance that something of its twin’s true personality might be retained in the rapacious mind-state the two upper minds and the core contained.
Equally, there was a possibility that the ship’s Mind had lost control but not integrity; perhaps – like a small garrison quitting the undefendable curtain wall of a great fortress to take refuge in an all-but-invulnerable central keep – the Mind had been forced to dissociate itself from all its subsystems and given up command to the invader, but succeeded in retaining its own personality in a Mind core as invulnerable to infiltration as the electronic core within the drone’s mind (where what was left of its twin now seethed) was proof against escape.
Elencher Minds had been in such dire situations before and survived; certainly such a core could be destroyed (they could not have their power turned off, as the drone’s core could; Mind cores had their own internal energy sources) but even the most brutal aggressor would far rather lay siege to that keep-core in the knowledge that the information contained within must surely fall to it eventually, than just destroy it.