You fool, the Attitude Adjuster thought, almost angry at the attacking ship. It was behaving stupidly, irresponsibly. A Culture craft should not be so prideful. It had thought the venom directed at itself by the Killing Time in its signal to it back at Pittance had been bluster; cheap bravado. But it had been worse; it had been sincere. Wounded self-esteem. Upset that it personally had been subject to a ruse designed to destroy it. As though its enemies cared an iota who it was.

The Attitude Adjuster doubted this was an attack sanctioned by the Killing Time’s peers. This wasn’t war, this was peevishness; this was taking it personally when, if there was anything war could be characterised as being, it was impersonal. Idiot. It deserved to perish. It did not merit the honour it doubtless thought would accrue to it for this reckless and selfish act.

The surrounding warships completed their changes. Just in time. When the attacking ship’s effector targeted the first of those craft, the focus did not flit onto the next as it had with all the rest; instead it stayed, latching on, concentrating and strengthening. The ROU caved in alarmingly quickly; the Attitude Adjuster guessed that it was made to reconfigure its engine fields to focus them inside its Mind - there was a sort of signalled shriek an instant before communication was lost - but the exact nature of its downfall was hidden in an accompanying shower of CAM warheads which obliterated it instantaneously. A mercy; it would have been a grisly way for a ship to die.

But too quick, thought the Attitude Adjuster; it was sure the attacker would have let the ROU - which the Killing Time had mistaken for the Attitude Adjuster - tear its intellect apart with its engines for longer if it had been totally fooled; the CAM dusting had been either a coup de grâce or a howl of frustration, perhaps both.

The Attitude Adjuster signalled to the rest of the fleet, instructing them too to impersonate itself, but even as it watched the ROU which had been attacked alongside it disappear astern in a fragmenting cage of radiations, it began to be afraid.

It had originally contacted the five nearest ships, hoping that the first one found and interrogated by the attacker’s systems would fool the Killing Time into believing it had found the one ship it was obviously seeking.

But that was stupid. It sensed the Torturer class ship’s effectors sweep over the craft on the far side of the hole in the wave of ships which the ROU’s destruction had created.

Insufficient elapsed time, the Attitude Adjuster whispered to itself. The ROU being quizzed at the moment was still reconfiguring its internal systems signature to resemble that of the Attitude Adjuster. The effector sweep flicked away from it, dismissing. The Attitude Adjuster quailed.

It had made itself a target! It should have-- HERE IT CAME!