It ran a systems check. Totally unharmed, apart from the self-inflicted degradation to its engines. It slackened off the power, dropping back to normal maxima and watching the readouts; significant degradation from here in about a hundred hours. Not too bad. Self-repairing would take days at all-engines-stop. Warhead stocks down to forty per cent; remanufacturing from first principles would take four to seven hours, depending on the exact mix it chose. Plasma chambers at ninety-six per cent efficiency; about right for the engagement system-use profile according to the relevant charts and graphs. Self-repair mechanisms champing at the bit. It looked around, concentrating on the view astern. No obvious threats; it let the self-repairers make a start on two of the four chambers. Full reconstruction time, two hundred and four seconds.

Entire engagement duration; eleven microseconds. Hmm; it had felt longer. But then that was only natural.

Should it make a second pass? It pondered this while it signalled the Shoot Them Later and a couple of other distant Minds with details of the engagement. Then it copied to the Steely Glint, without leaving the comm channels open. It needed time to think.

It felt excited, energised, re-purified by the engagement it had undergone. Its appetite was whetted. A further pass would be no-holds-barred multi-destructional, not a series of semi-defensive side-actions while it concentrated on searching for one individual ship. This next time it could really get nasty . . .

On the other hand, it had inflicted a more than reasonable amount of damage on the fleet for no ship-loss whatsoever and a barely significant degradation to its operational capacity. It had ignored the advice of a superior Mind in wartime but it had triumphed. It had gambled and won and there was a kind of unexpected elegance in cashing in its gains now. To pursue the matter further might look like obsessive self-regard, like ultra-militarism, especially now that the original object of its ire had been bested. Perhaps it would be better to accept whatever praise and/or calumny might now be heaped upon it and re-submit itself to the jurisdiction of the Culture’s war-command structure (though it was starting to have its doubts about the part of the Steely Glint in all this).

It drew level with the debris clouds left by the two ships destroyed in the final wave of the war fleet. It let them drop astern.

The wreck of the Attitude Adjuster came tumbling slowly towards it in hyperspace; coasting, slowing, drifting gradually back up towards the skein. Externally, it looked unharmed.

The Killing Time slowed to keep pace with the slackly somersaulting craft. It probed the Attitude Adjuster carefully with its senses, its effector targeted on the other ship’s Mind, ready on the instant. In human terms, this was like taking somebody’s pulse while keeping a gun stuck in their mouth.