There was always hope, the drone told itself; it must not give up hope. According to the specifications it had, the Displacer which had catapulted it out of the ill-fated ship had a range – with something the volume of Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 – of nearly a light second. Surely that was far enough to put it beyond range of detection? Certainly the Peace Makes Plenty’s sensors wouldn’t have had a hope of spotting something so small so far away; it just had to hope that neither could the artifact.
Excession; that was what the Culture called such things. It had become a pejorative term and so the Elench didn’t use it normally, except sometimes informally, amongst themselves. Excession; something excessive. Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever. Such things turned up or were created now and again. Encountering an example was one of the risks you ran when you went a-wandering.
So, now it knew what had happened to it and what the core 2/2 contained, the question was; what was to be done?
It had to get word to outside; that was the task it had been entrusted with by the ship, that was what its whole life-mission had become the instant the ship came under such intensive attack.
But how? Its tiny warp unit had been destroyed, its bom-com unit likewise, its HS laser too. It had nothing that worked at translight speeds, no way of unsticking itself or even a signal from the glutinous slowness that trapped anything unable to step outside the skein of space-time. The drone felt as if it was some quick, graceful flying insect, knocked down to a stagnant pond and trapped there by surface tension, all grace abandoned in its bedraggled, doomed struggle with a strange, cloyingly foreign medium.
It considered again the sub-core where its self-repair mechanisms waited. But not its own repair systems; those of its turncoat twin. It was beyond belief that those too had not been subverted by the invader. Worse than useless; a temptation. Because there was a vanishingly small chance that in all the excitement they had not been taken over.
Temptation… But no; it couldn’t risk it. It would be folly.
It would have to make its own self-repair units. It was possible, but it would take forever; a month. For a human a month was not that long; for a drone – even one thinking at the shamefully slow speed of light on the skein – it was like a sequence of life sentences. A month was not a long time to wait; drones were very good at waiting and had a whole suite of techniques to pass the time pleasantly or just side-step it, but it was an abominably long time to have to concentrate on anything, to have to work at a single task.
Even at the end of that month, it would just be the start. At the very least there would be a lot of fine tuning to be done; the self-repair mechanisms would need direction, amendment, tinkering with; some would doubtless dismantle where they were supposed to build, others would duplicate what they were meant to scour. It would be like releasing millions of potential cancer cells into an already damaged animal body and trying to keep track of each one. It could quite easily kill itself by mistake, or accidentally breach the containment around the core of its corrupted twin or the original self-repair mechanisms. Even if all went well, the whole process could take years.
Despair!
It set the initial routines under way all the same – what else could it do? – and thought on.
It had a few million particles of anti-matter stored, it had some maniple-field capability left (somewhere between finger- and arm-strength, but down-scalable to the point of being able to work at the micrometer scale, and capable of slicing molecular bonds; it would need both capabilities when it came to building the prototype self-repairer constructs), it possessed two hundred. and forty one-millimetre-long nanomissiles, also AM tipped, it could still put up a small mirror field about it, and it had its laser, which was not far off maximum potential. Plus it still had the thimbleful of mush that had been the final-resort back-up biochemical brain… Which might no longer be able to support thought, but could still inspire it…
Well, it was one way to use the nasty gooey mess. Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 started to fashion a shielded reaction chamber and began working out both how best to bring the anti-matter and the cellular gunge together to provide itself with the most reaction mass and maximum thrust and how to direct the resulting exhaust plume so as to minimise the chances of attracting attention.
Accelerating into the stars using a wasted brain; it had its amusing side, it supposed. It set those routines in motion too and – with the equivalent of a long sigh and the taking off of a jacket and the rolling up of sleeves – returned its attention to the self-repairer-building problem.
At that instant a skein wave passed around and through it; a sharp, purposeful ripple in space-time.
It stopped thinking for a nanosecond.
A few things produced such waves. Several were natural; collapsing stellar cores, for example. But this wave was compressed, tightly folded; not the massive, swell-long surge created when a star contracted into a black hole.
This wave was not natural; it had been made. It was a signal. Or it was part of a sense.
The drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 was helplessly aware of its body, the few kilos of mass it represented, resonating; producing an echoing signal that would transmit back along the radius of that expanding circular disturbance in the skein to whatever instrument had produced the pulse in the first place.
It felt… not despair. It felt sick.
It waited.
The reaction was not long in coming; a delicate, fanning, probing cluster of maser filaments, rods of energy seeming to converge almost at infinity, some distance off to one side from where it had guessed the artifact was, three hundred thousand or so kilometres away…
The drone tried to shield itself from the signals, but they overcame it. It started to shut down certain systems which might conceivably be corrupted by an attack through the maser signal itself, though the characteristics of the beam had not looked particularly sophisticated. Then suddenly the beam shut off.
The drone looked around. Nothing to be seen, but even as it scanned the cold, empty depths of the space around it, it felt the surface of space-time itself tremble again, all around it, ever so slightly. Something was coming.
The distant vibration increased slowly… The insect trapped in the surface tension of the pond would have gone still now, while the water quivered and whatever was advancing upon it – skating across the water’s surface or angling up from underneath – approached its helpless prey.
III
The car zipped along, slung under one of the monorails that ran amongst the superconducting coils beneath the ceiling of the habitat. Genar-Hofoen looked down through the angled windows of the car at the clouded framescape below.
God’shole habitat (it was much too small to be called an Orbital according to the Culture’s definitive nomenclature, plus it was enclosed) was – at nearly a thousand years old – one of the Affront’s older outposts in a region of space most civilisations had long since agreed to call the Fernblade. The small world was in the shape of a hollow ring; a tube ten kilometres in diameter and two thousand two hundred long which had been joined into a circle; the superconducting coils and EM wave guides formed the inner rim of the enormous wheel. The tiny, rapidly spinning black hole which provided the structure’s power sat where the wheel’s hub would have been. The circular-sectioned living space was like a highly pressurised tyre bulging from the inner rim, and where its tread would have been hung the gantries and docks where the ships of the Affront and a dozen other species came and went.
The whole lot was in a slow, distant orbit about an otherwise satellite-less brown dwarf mass just too small to be a proper star but which had long had the honour of being in exactly the right place to further the continuing expansion and consolidation of the Affront sphere of influence.
The monorail car rushed towards a huge wall spread entirely across the view ahead. The rails disappeared into a small, circular door, which opened like a sphincter as the car approached, then closed again behind it. It was dim in the car for a while as it traversed a short tunnel, then another door ahead of it dilated and it shot out into a huge open, mist-filled space where the view just disappeared amongst clouds and haze.
The interior of God’shole habitat was sectioned off into about forty individually isolable compartments, most of them crisscrossed by a web-work of frames, girders and tubular members, partly to provide additional strength for the structure but partly because these created a multitude of places for the Affront to anchor the nest spaces that were the basic cellular building-block of their architecture. There were more open compartments every few sections along the habitat, filled with little more than layers of cloud, a few floating nest space bundles and a selection of flora and fauna. These were the sections which more closely mirrored conditions on the sort of mainly methane-atmosphered planets and moons the Affront preferred, and it was in these the Affront indulged their greatest passion, by going hunting. It was one of these immense game reserves that the car was now crossing. Genar-Hofoen looked downwards again, but he couldn’t see a hunt in progress.