A feeling of--

No, it had gone, swept over it! Its own disguise had worked. It had been dismissed too, like the ROU alongside!

The effector focus jumped to another craft still further away. The Attitude Adjuster was dizzy with relief. It had survived! The plan still held, the huge filthy trick they were pulling was free to continue!

The way to the Excession lay open; the other Minds in the conspiracy would commend it if it survived; the-- . . . but it mustn’t think of the other ships involved. It had to accept responsibility for what had happened. It and it alone. It was the traitor. It would never reveal who had instigated this ghastly, gigadeathcrime-risking scheme; it had to assume the blame itself.

It had wrestled with the Mind at Pittance and pressed it when it had insisted it would die rather than yield (but it had had no choice!); it had allowed the human on Pittance to be destroyed (but it had fastened its effector on his puny animal brain when it had seen what was happening to him; it had read the animal’s brain-state, copied it, sucked it out of him before he’d died, so that at least he might live again in some form! Look! It had the file here ... there it went . . .). It had fooled the surrounding ships, it had lied to them, sent them messages from . . . from the ships it could not bear to think about.

But it was the right thing to do!

... Or was it just the thing it had chosen to believe was the right thing to do, when the other ships, the other Minds had persuaded it? What had its real motives been? Had it not just been flattered to be the object of such attention? Had it not always resented being passed over for certain small but prestigious missions in the past, nursing a bitter resentment that it was not trusted because it was seen as being - what? A hard-liner? Too inclined to shoot first? Too cynical towards the soft ideologies of the meat-beings? Too mixed up in its feelings about its own martial prowess and the shaming moral implications of being a machine designed for war? All those things, a little, perhaps. But that wasn’t all its fault!

... And yet, did it not accept that one had an irreducible ethical responsibility for one’s own actions? It did. And it accepted that and it had done terrible, terrible things. All the attempts it had made to compensate had been eddies in the flood; tiny retrograde movements towards good entirely produced by the ferocious turbulence of its headlong rush to ill.

It was evil.

How simple that reductive conclusion seemed.

But it had been obliged! . . . And yet it could not say by whom, so it had to accept the full responsibility for itself.