Excession

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.

It was heading towards the Affronter vessel at about half a klick a second; the ship's be-bladed, swollen- looking bulk drifted closer.

— Turn off your shields!

— I can't! It put expression into the signal, so that it came across as a wail.

— Now!

— I'm trying! I'm trying! You damaged me! Damaged me even more! Such weaponry! What chance have I, a mere drone, something smaller than an Affronter's beak, against such power?

Nearly in range. Not far. Not far now. Another two seconds.

— Drop your shields instantly and allow yourself to be taken over or suffer instant destruction.

Still nearly two seconds. It would never keep them talking long enough…

— Please don't! I'm attempting to shut off the shield projector, but it's in fail-safe mode; it won't let itself be shut off. It's arguing; can you believe that? But, honestly; I am doing my best. Please believe me. Please don't kill me. I'm the only survivor, you know; our ship was attacked! I was lucky to get away. I've never seen anything like it. Never heard of anything like it either.

A pause. A pause of animal dimensions. Time for animal thoughts. Loads of time.

— Final chance; turn off-

— There; turning shields off now. I'm all yours.

The drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 turned off its electromagnetic mirrorshield. In the same instant, it fired its laser straight at the Affronter ship.

An instant later it released the containment around its remaining stock of anti-matter, detonated its in-built self-destruct charge and instructed the single nanomissile it still carried within its body to explode too.

— Fuck you! were its final words.

Its last emotion was a mixture of sorrow, elation, and a kind of desperate pride that its plan might have worked… Then it died, instantly and forever, in its own small fireball of heat and light.

To the Affronter ship, the effect of the tiny drone's laser was rather less than a tickle; it flickered across its hull and barely singed it.

The cloud of glowing wreckage the drone's self-destruction had caused passed over the Affronter ship, and was duly swept by analysing sensors. Plasma. Atoms. Nothing as big as a molecule. Likewise the slowly expanding debris from the two groups of nanomissiles.

Disappointment, then; that had been a particularly sophisticated model of Elencher drone, not far behind the leading-edge of Culture drone technology. Capturing one would have been a good prize. Still, it had put up a reasonable fight considering, and provided a morsel of unexpected sport.

The Affront light cruiser Furious Purpose came about and headed slowly away from the scene of its miniature battle, carefully scanning for more nanomissiles. They posed no threat to the cruiser, of course, but the small drone appeared to have tried to use some of the tiny weapons to place information in, and it might have left others behind which were not inclined to self-destruct when effector-targeted. None showed up. The cruiser back-tracked along the course the drifting drone appeared to have taken. It discovered a small cooling cloud of matter at one point, the remnants of some sort of explosion apparently, but that was all. Beyond that; nothing. Nothing everywhere one looked. Most dissatisfying.

The Furious Purpose's restless officers debated how much more time they should spend looking for this lost Elencher ship. Had something happened to it? Had the small drone been lying? Might there be a more interesting opponent floating around out here somewhere?

Or might it all be a ruse, a decoy? The Culture — the real Culture, the wily ones, not these semi-mystical Elenchers with their miserable hankering to be somebody else — had been known to give whole Affronter fleets the run-around for several months with not dissimilar enticements and subterfuges, keeping them occupied, seemingly on the track of some wildly promising prey which turned out to be nothing at all, or a Culture ship with some ridiculous but earnestly argued excuse, while the Culture or one of its snivelling client species got on — or away — with something else somewhere else, spoiling rightful Affronter fun.

How were they to know this was not one of those occasions? Perhaps the Elencher ship was under contract to the Culture proper. Perhaps they had lost the Explorer craft and a GCU — trailing them as they had been trailing