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.