The expression on his face was such that the retirement-home warden almost fainted and had to sit down quickly, but the doctor declared the end had probably been quick.

[tight beam, M16.4, tra. @n4.28.858.8893]

xGCU Grey Area

oGSV Honest Mistake

There. I am on my way.

oo

xGSV Honest Mistake

oGCU Grey Area

Not before time.

oo

There was work to be done.

oo

More animal brains to be delved into?

oo

History to be unearthed. Truth to be discovered.

oo

I would have thought that one of the last places one would have expected to find on any itinerary concerning the search for truth would be inside the minds of mere animals.

oo

When the mere animals concerned have orchestrated one of the most successful and total expungings of both a significant part of their own species and every physical record regarding that act of genocide, one has remarkably little choice.

oo

I'm sure no one would deny your application does you credit.

oo

Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker.

oo

Absolutely.

Well, let me wish you all the best with whatever it is our friends might require of you.

oo

Thank you.

My aim is to please…

oo

(End signal file.)

He left a trail of weaponry and the liquefied remains of gambling chips. The two heavy micro rifles clattered to the absorber mat just outside the airlock door and the cloak fell just beyond them. The guns glinted in the soft light reflecting off gleaming wooden panels. The mercury gambling chips in his jacket pocket, exposed to the human-ambient heat of the module's interior, promptly melted. He felt the change happen, and stopped, mystified, to stare into his pockets. He shrugged, then turned his pockets inside out and let the mercury splash onto the mat. He yawned and walked on. Funny the module hadn't greeted him.

The pistols bounced on the carpeted floor of the hall and lay beading with frost. He left the short jacket hanging on a piece of sculpture in the hall. He yawned again. It was not far off the time of habitat dawn. Very much time for bed. He rolled down the tops of the knee-boots and kicked them both down the corridor leading to the swimming pool.

He was pulling down his trousers as he entered the module's main social area, shuffling forward bent over and holding on to the wall as he cursed the garments and tried to kick them off without falling over.

There was somebody there. He stopped and stared.

It looked very much like his favourite uncle was sitting in one of the lounge's best seats.

Genar-Hofoen stood upright and swayed, staring through numerous blinks.

"Uncle Tishlin?" he said, squinting at the apparition. He leant on an antique cabinet and finally hauled his trousers off.

The figure — tall, white-maned and with a light smile playing on its craggily severe face — stood up and adjusted its long formal jacket. "Just a pretend version, Byr," the voice rumbled. The hologram put its head back and fixed him with a measuring, questioning look. "They really do want you to do this thing for them, boy."

Genar-Hofoen scratched his head and muttered something to the suit. It began to peel off around him.

"Will you tell me what the hell it actually is, Uncle?" he asked, stepping out of the gelfield and taking a deep breath of module air, more to annoy the suit than because the air tasted better. The suit gathered itself up into a head-sized ball and floated wordlessly away to clean itself.

The hologram of his uncle breathed out slowly and crossed its arms in a way Genar-Hofoen remembered from his early childhood.

"Put simply, Byr," the image said, "they want you to steal the soul of a dead woman."

Genar-Hofoen stood there, quite naked, still swaying, still blinking.

"Oh," he said, after a while.

Hup!.. and here we are, waking up. Quick scan around, nothing immediately threatening, it would seem… Hmm. Floating in space. Odd. Nobody else around. That's funny. View's a bit degraded. Oh-oh, that's a bad sign. Don't feel quite right, either. Stuff missing here… Clock running way slow, like it's down amongst the electronics crap… Run full system check.

… Oh, good grief!

The drone drifted through the darkness of interstellar space. It really was alone. Profoundly, even frighteningly alone. It picked through the debris that had been its power, sensory and weapon systems, appalled at the wasteland it was discovering within itself. The drone felt weird. It knew who it was — it was Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, a type D4 military drone of the Explorer Ship Peace Makes Plenty, a vessel of the Stargazer Clan, part of the Fifth Fleet of the Zetetic Flench — but its real-time memories only began from the instant it had woken up here, a zillion klicks from anywhere, slap bang in the middle of nothing with the shit kicked out of it. What a mess! Who had done this? What had happened to it? Where were its memories? Where was its mind-state?

Actually it suspected it knew. It was functioning on the middle level of its five stepped mind-modes; the electronic.

Below lay an atomechanical complex and beneath that a biochemical brain. In theory the routes to both lay open; in practice both were compromised. The atomechanical mind wasn't responding correctly to the system-state signals it was receiving, and the biochemical brain was simply a mush; either the drone had been doing some hard manoeuvring recently or it had been clobbered by something. It felt like dumping the whole biochemical unit into space now but it knew the cellular soup its final back-up mind-substrate had turned into might come in handy for something.

Above, where it ought to be right now, there were a couple of enormously wide conduits leading to the photonic nucleus and beyond that the true AI core. Both completely blocked off, and metaphorically plastered with warning signals. The equivalent of a single lit tell-tale adjacent to the photonic pipe indicated there was activity of some sort in there. The AI core was either dead, empty or just not saying.

The drone ran another systems-control check. It seemed to be in charge of the whole outfit, what was left of it. It wondered if the sensor and weaponry systems degradation was real. Perhaps it was an illusion; perhaps those units were in fact in perfect working order and under the control of one or both of the higher mind components. It dug deeper into the units" programming. No, it didn't look possible.

Unless the whole situation was a simulation. That was possible. A test: what would you do if you suddenly found yourself drifting alone in interstellar space, almost every system severely damaged, reduced to a level-three mind-state with no sign of help anywhere and no recollection how you got here or what happened to you? It sounded like a particularly nasty simulation problem; a nearly-worst-case scenario dreamt up by a Drone Training and Selection Board.

Well, there was no way of telling, and it had to act as though it was all real.

It kept looking around inside its own mind-state. Ah ha.

There were a couple of closed sub-cores intact within its electronic mind, sealed and labelled as potentially — though not probably — dangerous. There was a similar warning attached to the self-repair control-routine matrices. The drone let those be for the moment. It would check out everything else that it could before it started opening packages with what might prove to be nasty surprises inside.

Where the hell was it? It scanned the stars. A matrix of figures flashed into its consciousness. Definitely the middle of nowhere. The general volume was called the Upper Leaf-Swirl by most people; forty-five kilolights from galactic centre. The nearest star — fourteen standard light months away — was called Esperi, an old red giant which had long since swallowed up its complement of inner planets and whose insubstantial orb of gases now glowed dully upon a couple of distant, icy worlds and a distant cloud of comet nuclei. No life anywhere; just another boring, barren system like a hundred million others.