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.

"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.