The drone, still tumbling through interstellar space at two hundred and eighty kilometres a second, felt a kind of revulsion at the very idea of having a treacherous, perverted version of its twin locked inside its own mind. Its first reaction was to expunge it; it thought about just dumping the core into the vacuum and wasting it with its laser, the one weapon which still seemed to be working at close to normal capacity; or it could just shut off power to the core, letting whatever was in it die for want of energy.

And yet it mustn’t; like the two higher mind components, the ravaged version of its twin’s mind-state might contain clues to the nature of the artifact’s own mind-type. It, the AI core and the photonic nucleus all had to be kept as evidence; retained, perhaps, as samples from which a kind of antidote to the artifact’s poisonous infectivity might be drawn. There was even a chance that something of its twin’s true personality might be retained in the rapacious mind-state the two upper minds and the core contained.

Equally, there was a possibility that the ship’s Mind had lost control but not integrity; perhaps - like a small garrison quitting the undefendable curtain wall of a great fortress to take refuge in an all-but-invulnerable central keep - the Mind had been forced to dissociate itself from all its subsystems and given up command to the invader, but succeeded in retaining its own personality in a Mind core as invulnerable to infiltration as the electronic core within the drone’s mind (where what was left of its twin now seethed) was proof against escape.

Elencher Minds had been in such dire situations before and survived; certainly such a core could be destroyed (they could not have their power turned off, as the drone’s core could; Mind cores had their own internal energy sources) but even the most brutal aggressor would far rather lay siege to that keep-core in the knowledge that the information contained within must surely fall to it eventually, than just destroy it.

There was always hope, the drone told itself; it must not give up hope. According to the specifications it had, the Displacer which had catapulted it out of the ill-fated ship had a range - with something the volume of Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 - of nearly a light second. Surely that was far enough to put it beyond range of detection? Certainly the Peace Makes Plenty’s sensors wouldn’t have had a hope of spotting something so small so far away; it just had to hope that neither could the artifact.