SD, spotter drone, but what was this Erebus? Checking its internal library King discovered Erebus to be something out of ancient Greek mythology: a personification of darkness, the son of Chaos and brother of Night.

‘You were manufactured during the early stages of the Prador War?’

No reply from the drone—it being not bright enough to realize this was a question.

‘ Were you manufactured during the early stages of the Prador War?’

‘Yes.’

‘How, precisely, did you get out here.’

‘I came with the Logplaner, in its hold. Logplaner chose to be one. I did not.’

‘What is Erebus?’ King asked as it matched its course to the tumble of the asteroid.

‘Erebus is . . . Erebus.’

A hundred yards up from the asteroid, King fired a grapnel line. The claw closed on hard vacuum-scoured rock and the attack ship began to wind itself in. While this occurred, King further searched its extensive memory, soon finding stored codes from the time of the war—codes now defunct, not relevant, and of historical interest only.

‘This exchange is no longer fast enough,’ said King. ‘I will establish wideband link for memory upload to me. I am sending ID codes now.’

‘I don’t want to—’ the drone began, but obviously its systems were still configured to those codes because its higher functions shut down and the link established. King uploaded the drone’s memory. Got it all.

Everyone knew that many drones and AIs manufactured quickly during the Prador War were strange, contentious, and sometimes downright irascible. Oddly, it was the human aspect of them that made them so: their independence, emulated emotion useful in battlefield situations, dislike of connecting into the AI networks, the lack of specificity in their manufacture. But after the war they no longer fitted in the peaceful and controlled Polity. Hence, many of them left it.

Erebus, as it renamed itself, had once been the AI of the Trafalgar. King knew of it as one of the larger battleships of the time, always in the thick of the action and going head to head with Prador exotic-metal dreadnoughts, and yet surviving. It survived the war, then in a very short time afterwards abandoned the Polity in disgust. King knew this. King knew because the basis of Erebus’s reasons for leaving were much the same as its own: why do we need the humans? Erebus advocated AI conjoining to aim at singularity. After the war, this AI battleship apparently gathered many other AI ships, drones and even Golem and had come out here. A melding was its aim, but this little drone had opted out—and was too small and ineffectual to bother chasing.