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.
Panic! If they remained intact and the Affronters captured them and weren’t a great deal more careful than they were notorious for being… It pushed harder; the components duly drifted out, losing power the instant contact lapsed with the drone’s body. Whatever was inside them should be dead or dying now. It blasted them with its laser anyway, turning them into hot dust, then vented the powder behind it round the edge of the mirrorshield, where it might interfere with the laser a little. A very little.
It readied the core inside its present substrate; that would have to be dumped and lasered too.
Then the drone had an idea.
It thought about it. If it had been a human, its mouth would have gone dry.
It turned round inside the tight confines of its pummelled shield and fired all two hundred of the nanomissile engines. It shook off the remaining loose nanomissiles and fired thirty of them straight at the Affronter ship. The other nine it left tumbling behind it like a handful of tiny black-body needle-tips, with their own instructions and the small amount of spare capacity in their microscopic brains packed with coded nonsense.
The nanomissiles fired at the Affronter ship accelerated towards it in a cloud of sparkling light ahead of the drone; they were picked off, one by one, over the course of a millisecond, in a dizzy flaring scatter of light-blossoms, their tiny warheads and the remains of their anti-matter fuel erupting together; the last one to be targeted by the Affronter’s effector and forced to self-destruct had closed the range to the ship by less than a kilometre.
Behind, all nine of the tumbling nanomissiles must have been picked out by the effector as well, because they detonated too.
And with any luck you’ll think those were my messages in bottles and that was my neat idea, Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 thought, decoupling the core with its twin’s mind-state in it. The core de-powered. Whatever was in there died. It had no time to mourn; it rearranged its internal state to shunt the core to the outside, then let its body settle back to normal. It pushed the core back down over its blistered, cracked casing, to the top of the rear panel, near where the wreckage of the cobbled-together and blown-apart reaction chamber hung, then it let the core fall into the livid plasma and sleeting radiation of the nanomissiles’ exhausts; it flared and disintegrated, falling astern in a bright trail of fire.
The laser targeted on the drone was heading into the X-ray part of the spectrum; it would break through the mirror shield in a second and a half. It would take the drone four and a half seconds to get within range of the ship.
Shit. It waited until the mirrorshield was a couple of tenths of a second from failing, then signalled: ~ I surrender!, and hoped that it was talking to another machine; if it was relying on Affronter reactions it’d be fried before the message got through to their stupid animal brains.
The laser flicked off. The drone kept its EM shields up.