Excession c-5, Page 3

  The drone curved through the air, bounced off another wall and the floor and raced into the hull-wall companionway to find a machine similar to itself screaming towards it.

  It knew this machine, too; it was its twin. It was its closest sibling/friend/lover/comrade in all the great distributed, forever changing civilisation that was the Blench.

  X-ray lasers flickered from the converging machine, only millimetres above the drone, producing detonations somewhere way behind it while it flicked on its mirrorshields, flipped in the air, ejected its old AI core and the semi-biochemical unit into the air behind it and spun around in an outside loop to continue down the companionway; the two components it had ejected flared beneath it, instantly vaporising and surrounding it with plasma. It fired its own laser at the approaching drone — the blast was mirrored off, blossoming like fiery petals which raged against and pierced the corridor walls — and effectored the displacer pod controls, powering the machinery up into a preset sequence.

  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…

  — Look, can't you just kill me and get it o-?

  But with that, the effector weapon altered its set-up momentarily, and — in effect — sucked the little machine's intellect out of its ruined and smouldering body.

  III

  "Byr Genar-Hofoen, my good friend, welcome!"

  Colonel Alien-Befriender (first class) Fivetide Humidyear VII of the Winterhunter tribe threw four of his limbs around the human and hugged him tightly to his central mass, pursing his lip fronds and pressing his front beak to the human's cheek. "Mmmmww wah! There! Ha ha!"

  Genar-Hofoen felt the Diplomatic Force officer's kiss through the few millimetres" thickness of the gelfield suit as a moderately sharp impact on his jaw followed by a powerful sucking that might have led someone less experienced in the diverse and robust manifestations of Affronter friendliness to conclude that the being was either trying to suck his teeth out through his cheek or had determined to test whether a Culture Gelfield Contact/Protection Suit, Mk 12, could be ripped off its wearer by a localised partial vacuum. What the crushingly powerful four-limbed hug would have done to a human unprotected by a suit designed to withstand pressures comparable to those found at the bottom of an ocean probably did not bear thinking about, but then a human exposed without protection to the conditions required to support Affronter life would be dying in at least three excitingly different and painful ways anyway without having to worry about being crushed by a cage of leg-thick tentacles.

  "Fivetide; good to see you again, you brigand!" Genar-Hofoen said, slapping the Affronter about the beak-end with the appropriate degree of enthusiastic force to indicate bonhomie.

  "And you, and you!" the Affronter said. He released the man from its grasp, twirled with surprising speed and grace and — clasping one of the human's hands in a tentacle end — pulled him through the roaring crush of Affronters near the nest space entrance to a clearer part of the web membrane.

  The nest space was hemispherical in shape and easily a hundred metres across. It was used mainly as a regimental mess and dining hall and so was hung with flags, banners, the hides of enemies, bits and pieces of old weapons and military paraphernalia. The curved, veined-looking walls were similarly adorned with plaques, company, battalion, division and regimental honour plaques and the heads, genitals, limbs or other acceptably distinctive body parts of old adversaries.

  Genar-Hofoen had visited this particular nest space before on a few occasions. He looked up to see if the three ancient human heads which the hall sported were visible this evening; the Diplomatic Force prided itself on having the tact to order that the recognisable trophy bits of any given alien be covered over when a still animate example of that species paid a visit, but sometimes they forgot. He located the heads — scarcely more than three little dots hidden high on one sub-dividing drape-wall — and noted that they had not been covered up.

  The chances were this was simply an oversight, though it was equally possible that it was entirely deliberate and either meant to be an exquisitely weighted insult carefully contrived to keep him unsettled and in his place, or intended as a subtle but profound compliment to indicate that he was being accepted as one of the boys, and not like one of those snivellingly timid aliens who got all upset and shirty just because they saw a close relative's hide" gracing an occasional table.

  That there was absolutely no rapid way of telling which of these possibilities was the case was exactly the sort of trait the human found most endearing in the Affront. It was, equally, just the kind of attribute the Culture in general and his predecessors in particular had found to be such a source of despair.

  Genar-Hofoen found himself grinning wryly at the three distant heads, and half hoping that Fivetide would notice.

  Fivetide's eye stalks swivelled. "Waiter-scum!" he bellowed at a hovering juvenile eunuch. "Here, wretch!"

  The waiter was half the size of the big male and childishly unscarred unless you counted the stump of the creature's rear beak. The juvenile floated closer, trembling even more than politeness dictated, until it was within a tentacle reach. "This thing," roared Fivetide, flicking a limb-end to indicate Genar-Hofoen, "is the alien beast-human you should already have been briefed on if your Chief is to avoid a sound thrashing. It might look like prey but it is in fact an honoured and treasured guest and it needs feeding much as we do; rush to the animals" and outworlders" serving table and fetch the sustenance prepared for it. Now!" Fivetide screamed, his voice producing a small visible shockwave in the mostly nitrogen atmosphere. The juvenile eunuch waiter vented away with suitable alacrity.

  Fivetide turned to the human. "As a special treat for you," he shouted, "we have prepared some of the disgusting glop you call food and a container of liquid based on that poisonous water stuff. God-shit, how we spoil you, eh!" He tentacle-slapped the human in the midriff. The gelfield suit absorbed the blow by stiffening; Genar-Hofoen staggered a little to one side, laughing.

  "Your generosity near bowls me over."

  "Good! Do you like my new uniform?" the Affronter officer asked, sucking back a little from the human and pulling himself up to his full height. Genar-Hofoen made a show of looking the other being up and down.

  The average fully grown Affronter consisted of a mass the shape of a slightly flattened ball about two metres in girth and one and a half in height, suspended under a veined, frilled gas sac which varied in diameter between one and five metres according to the Affronter's desired buoyancy and which was topped by a small sensor bump. When an Affronter was in aggressive/defensive mode, the whole sac could be deflated and covered by protective plates on the top of the central body mass. The principal eyes and ears were carried on two stalks above the fore beak covering the creature's mouth; a rear beak protected the genitals. The anus/gas vent was positioned centrally under the main body.

  To the central mass were attached, congenitally, between six and eleven tentacles of varying thicknesses and lengths, at least four of which normally ended in flattened, leaf-shaped paddles. The actual number of limbs possessed by any particular adult male Affronter one encountered entirely depended on how many fights and/or hunts it had taken part in and how successful a part in them it had played; an Affronter with an impressive array of sc
ars and more stumps than limbs was considered either an admirably dedicated sportsman or a brave but stupid and probably dangerous incompetent, depending entirely on the individual's reputation.

  Fivetide himself had been born with nine limbs — considered the most propitious number amongst the best families, providing one had the decency to lose at least one in duel or hunt — and had duly lost one to his fencing master while at military college in a duel over the honour of the fencing master's chief wife.

  "It's a very impressive uniform, Fivetide," Genar-Hofoen said.

  "Yes, it is rather, isn't it?" the Affronter said, flexing his body.

  Fivetide's uniform consisted of multitudinous broad straps and sashes of metallic-looking material which were crisscrossed over his central mass and dotted with holsters, sheaths and brackets — all occupied by weapons but sealed for the formal dinner they were here to attend — the glittering discs Genar-Hofoen knew were the equivalents of medals and decorations, and the associated portraits of particularly impressive game-animals killed and rivals seriously maimed. A group of discreetly blank portrait discs indicated the females of other clans Fivetide could honourably claim to have successfully impregnated; the discs edged with precious metals bore witness to those who had put up a struggle. Colours and patterns on the sashes indicated Fivetide's clan, rank and regiment (which was what the Diplomatic Force, to which Fivetide belonged, basically was… a point not wisely ignored by any species who wished to have — or just found themselves having — any dealings with the Affront).

  Fivetide pirouetted, gas sac swelling and buoying him up so that he rose above the spongy surface of the nest space, limbs dangling, taking hardly any of his weight. "Am I not… resplendent?" The gelfield suit's translator decided that the adjective Fivetide had chosen to describe himself should be rendered with a florid rolling of the syllables involved, making the Affronter officer sound like an overly stagey actor.

  "Positively intimidating," Genar-Hofoen agreed.