The attack on its photonic nucleus came at the same moment, manifesting itself as a perceived disturbance in the space-time fabric, warping the internal structure of the drone’s light-energised mind from outside normal space. It’s using the engines, thought the drone, senses swimming, its awareness seeming to break up and evaporate somehow as it effectively began to go unconscious. fm-am!, cried a tiny, long-thought-out sub routine. It felt itself switch to amplitude modulation instead of frequency modulation; reality snapped back into focus again, though its senses still remained disconnected and thoughts still felt odd. But if I don’t react otherwise… The other drone fired at it again, zooming towards it on an intercept course. Ramming. How inelegant. The drone mirrored the rays, still refusing to adjust its internal photonic topography to allow for the wildly shifting wavelength changes demanding attention in its mind.
The displacer pod just the other side of the ship’s hull hummed into life; a set of coordinates corresponding with the drone’s own present position appeared flickering in the drone’s awareness, describing the volume of space that would be nipped off from the surface of the normal universe and hurled far beyond the stricken Elencher ship. Damn, might make it yet; just roll with it, the drone thought dizzily. It rolled; literally, physically, in mid-air.
Light, bursting from all around it and bearing the signature of plasma fire, drummed into its casing with what felt like the pressure of a small nuclear blast. Its fields mirrored what they could; the rest roasted the machine to white heat and started to seep inside its body, beginning to destroy its more vulnerable components. Still it held out, completing its roll through the superheated gases around it – mostly vaporised floor-tiles, it noted – dodging the shape spearing towards it that was its murderous twin, noticing (almost lazily, now) that the displacer pod had completed its power-up and was moving to clasp/discharge… while its mind involuntarily registered the information contained in the blast of radiation and finally caved in under the force of the alien purpose encoded within.
It felt itself split in two, leaving behind its real personality, giving that up to the invading power of its photonic core’s abducted intent and becoming slowly, balefully aware of its own abstracted echo of existence in clumsy electronic form.
The displacer on the other side of the hull wall completed its cycle; it snapped a field around and instantly swallowed a sphere of space not much bigger than the head of a human; the resulting bang would have been quite loud in anything other than the mayhem the on-board battle had created.
The drone – barely larger than two adult human hands placed together – fell smoking, glowing, to the side wall of the companionway, which was now in effect the floor.
Gravity returned to normal and the drone clunked to the floor proper, clattering onto the heat-scarred undersurface beneath the chimney that was a vertical companionway. Something was raging in the drone’s real mind, behind walls of insulation. Something powerful and angry and determined. The machine produced a thought equivalent to a sigh, or a shrug of the shoulders, and interrogated its atomechanical nucleus, just for good form’s sake… but that avenue was irredeemably heat-corrupted… not that it mattered; it was over.
All over.
Done…
Then the ship hailed it, quite normally, over its communicator.
Now why didn’t you try that in the first place?, thought the drone. Well, it answered itself, because I wouldn’t have replied, of course. It found that almost funny.
But it couldn’t reply; the com unit’s send facility had been wasted by the heat too. So it waited.
Gas drifted, stuff cooled, other stuff condensed, making pretty designs on the floor. Things creaked, radiations played, and hazy EM indications suggested the ship’s engines and major systems were back on line. The heat making its way through the drone’s body dissipated slowly, leaving it alive but still crippled and incapable of movement or action. It would take it days to bootstrap the routines that would even start to replace the mechanisms that would construct the self-repair nano-units. That seemed quite funny too. The vessel made noises and signals like it was moving off through space again. Meanwhile the thing in the drone’s real mind went on raging. It was like living with a noisy neighbour, or having a headache, thought the drone. It went on waiting.
Eventually a heavy maintenance unit, about the size of a human torso and escorted by a trio of small self-motivated effector side-arms appeared at the far end of the vertical companionway above it and floated down through the currents of climbing gas until they were directly over the small, pocked, smoking and splintered casing of the drone. The effector weapons’ aim had stayed locked onto the drone the whole way down.
Then one of the guns powered up and fired at the small machine.
Shit. Bit summary, dammit… the drone had time to think.
But the effector was powered only enough to provide a two-way communication channel.
~ Hello? said the maintenance unit, through the gun.
~ Hello yourself.
~ The other machine is gone.
~ I know; my twin. Snapped. Displaced. Get thrown a long way by one of those big Displace Pods, something that small. One-off coordinates, too. Never find it-
The drone knew it was babbling, its electronic mind was probably under effector incursion but too damn stupid even to know it and so gibbering as a side effect, but it couldn’t stop itself;
~ Yep, totally gone. Entity overboard. One-throw XYZs. Never find it. No point in even looking for it. Unless you want me to step into the breach too, of course; I’d go take a squint, if you like, if the pod’s still up for it; personally it wouldn’t be too much trouble…
~ Did you mean all that to happen?
The drone thought about lying, but now it could feel the effector weapon in its mind, and knew that not only the weapon and the maintenance drone but the ship and whatever had taken over all of them could see it was thinking about lying… so, feeling that it was itself again, but knowing it had no defences left, wearily it said,
~ Yes.
~ From the beginning?
~ Yes. From the beginning.
~ We can find no trace of this plan in your ship’s mind.
~ Well, nar-nar-ne-fucking-nar-nar to you, then, prickbrains.
~ Illuminating insults. Are you in pain?
~ No. Look, who are you?
~ Your friends.
~ I don’t believe this; I thought this ship was smart, but it gets taken over by something that talks like a Hegemonising Swarm out of an infant’s tale.
~ We can discuss that later, but what was the point of displacing beyond our reach your twin machine rather than yourself? It was ours, was it not? Or did we miss something?
~ You missed something. The displacer was programmed to… oh, just read my brains; I’m not sore but I’m tired.
Silence for a moment. Then,
~ I see. The displacer copied your mind-state to the machine it ejected. That was why we found your twin so handily placed to intercept you when we realised you were not yet ours and there might be a way out via the displacer.
~ One should always be prepared for every eventuality, even if it’s getting shafted by a dope with bigger guns.
~ Well, if cuttingly, put. Actually, I believe your twin machine may have been badly damaged by the plasma implosure directed at yourself, and as all you were trying to do was get away, rather than find a novel method of attacking us, the matter is anyway not of such great importance.
~ Very convincing.
~ Ah, sarcasm. Well, never mind. Come and join us now.
~ Do I have a choice in this?
~ What, you would rather die? Or do you think we would leave you to repair yourself as you are/were and hence attack us in the future?
~ Just checking.
~ We shall transcribe you into the ship’s own core with the others who suffered mortality.
~ And the humans, the mammal crew?
~ What of them?
~ Are they dead, or in the core?
~ Three are solely in the core, including the one whose weapon we used to try to stop you. The rest sleep, with inactive copies of the brain-states in the core, for study. We have no intentions of destroying them, if that’s what concerns you. Do you care for them particularly?
~ Never could stand the squidgy great slow lumps myself.
~ What a harsh machine you are. Come-
~ I’m a soldier drone, you cretin; what do you expect? And anyway; I’m harsh! You just wasted my ship and all my friends and comrades and you call me harsh-
~ You insisted upon invasionary contact, not us. And there have been no mind-state total losses at all except that brought about by your displacer. But let me explain all this in more comfort…