Excession; that was what the Culture called such things. It had become a pejorative term and so the Elench didn’t use it normally, except sometimes informally, amongst themselves. Excession; something excessive. Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever. Such things turned up or were created now and again. Encountering an example was one of the risks you ran when you went a-wandering.

So, now it knew what had happened to it and what the core 2/2 contained, the question was; what was to be done?

It had to get word to outside; that was the task it had been entrusted with by the ship, that was what its whole life-mission had become the instant the ship came under such intensive attack.

But how? Its tiny warp unit had been destroyed, its bom-com unit likewise, its HS laser too. It had nothing that worked at translight speeds, no way of unsticking itself or even a signal from the glutinous slowness that trapped anything unable to step outside the skein of space-time. The drone felt as if it was some quick, graceful flying insect, knocked down to a stagnant pond and trapped there by surface tension, all grace abandoned in its bedraggled, doomed struggle with a strange, cloyingly foreign medium.

It considered again the sub-core where its self-repair mechanisms waited. But not its own repair systems; those of its turncoat twin. It was beyond belief that those too had not been subverted by the invader. Worse than useless; a temptation. Because there was a vanishingly small chance that in all the excitement they had not been taken over.

Temptation . . . But no; it couldn’t risk it. It would be folly.

It would have to make its own self-repair units. It was possible, but it would take forever; a month. For a human a month was not that long; for a drone - even one thinking at the shamefully slow speed of light on the skein - it was like a sequence of life sentences. A month was not a long time to wait; drones were very good at waiting and had a whole suite of techniques to pass the time pleasantly or just side-step it, but it was an abominably long time to have to concentrate on anything, to have to work at a single task.

Even at the end of that month, it would just be the start. At the very least there would be a lot of fine tuning to be done; the self-repair mechanisms would need direction, amendment, tinkering with; some would doubtless dismantle where they were supposed to build, others would duplicate what they were meant to scour. It would be like releasing millions of potential cancer cells into an already damaged animal body and trying to keep track of each one. It could quite easily kill itself by mistake, or accidentally breach the containment around the core of its corrupted twin or the original self-repair mechanisms. Even if all went well, the whole process could take years.