~ 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

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. ‘Mmmmwwwah! 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.