The situation was so unusual the Peace Makes Plenty even considered breaking with Elench precedent by informing Tier habitat or one of its peers what was going on; the nearest other Stargazer craft was a month’s travel away, but might be able to help if the Peace Makes Plenty got itself into trouble. In the end, however, it stuck with tradition and kept quiet. There was a kind of stealthy pragmatism in this; an encounter of the sort the ship was embarking upon might only be successful if the Elencher craft could fairly claim to be acting on its own, without having made what might, to a suspicious contactee, look like a request for reinforcements.

Plus, there was simple pride involved; an Elencher ship would not be an Elencher ship if it started acting like part of a committee; why, it might as well then be a Culture ship!

The drone-probe was dispatched with the Peace Makes Plenty keeping in close contact. The instant the probe passed within the horizon of the artifact, it--

The records the drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 had access to ended there.

Something, obviously, had happened.

The next thing it personally knew, the Peace Makes Plenty had been under attack. The assault had been almost unbelievably swift and ferocious; the drone-probe must have been taken over almost instantaneously, the ship’s subsystems surrendered milliseconds later and the integrity of the ship’s Mind shattered within - at a guess - less than a second after the drone-probe had infringed the space beneath the artifact.

A few more seconds later and Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 itself had been involved in a last desperate attempt to get word of the ship’s plight to the outside galaxy while the vessel’s usurped systems did their damnedest to prevent it; by destroying it if necessary. The long-agreed, carefully worked-out ruse using itself and its twin and the preprogrammed independent Displacer unit had worked, though only just, and even so, with considerable damage to the drone that had been Sisela Ytheleus 2/2 and was now Sisela Ytheleus 1/2, with a kind of twisted remnant of Sisela Ytheleus 2/2 lodged within it.

The drone had carried out the equivalent of pressing an ear to the wall of the core with its twin’s mind in it, carefully accessing a meaning-free abstract of the activity inside the closed-off core to find out what was happening in there. It was like listening to a furious argument going on in an adjoining room; a chilling, frightening sound; the sort of bawling match that made you expect the sound of screams and things breaking, any moment.

Its original self had probably died in the process of escape; instead of its own body it now inhabited that of its twin, whose violated, defected mind-state now raged helplessly within the core labelled 2/2.