KarlMrax

two hundred metres away, where a glittering black cube perhaps fifteen metres to a side sat under the overhead lights. He peered at the distant black object, pointed the gun at it again, and inspected the magnified view on one of the gun's screens. 'Weird,' he muttered, and scratched his head.

• The Use of Weapons, Chapter Six - Page 158

The gun rammed back against his shoulder, and a blinding flash of light threw his shadow behind him. The sound was like a grenade going off. A pencil-thin white line seared the length of the smallbay and joined the gun to the fifteen metre cube of ice, which shattered into a

KarlMrax

I could bombard half the city from here (hell, don’t forget the curve shots; I could bombard the whole damn city from here); I could bring down the escort vessels and attacking planes and police cruisers; I could give the Vreccile the biggest shock they’ve ever had, before they got me . . .

• A Gift From the Culture

I drank some more of the sharp-tasting spirit. The gun gibbered on, talking about beam-spread diameters, gyroscopic weave patterns, gravity- contour mode, line-of-sight mode, curve shots, spatter and pierce settings.

KarlMrax

In two steps (Gurgeh realized in a distant, game-sense way even as he was speaking and the drone was replying), he was going to be adjacent to . . . it took one more step to analyze the problem . . . something bad, something jarring and discordant . . . there was something . . . different; wrong about the three-group he was about to pass on his left; like unplaced ghost-pieces hiding in forest territory. . . . He had no idea exactly what was wrong with the group, but he knew immediately—as the protagonizing structures of the game-sense claimed precedence in his thoughts—that he wasn’t going to risk putting a piece in there.

. . . Another half-step . . .

KarlMrax

She opened her bag. She looked at what was lying on top of her few clothes and possessions. “I don’t recall packing you,” she muttered, and was immediately uncertain whether she was talking to herself or not (she instinctively tried to read the device with her active EM sense, but of course that didn’t work any more).

She was not talking to herself.

“Well remembered,” the thing she was looking at said. It appeared to be a dildo.

“Are you what I think you are?”

KarlMrax

The Chelgrian was nearly as long as Kabe was tall, and covered in fur that varied from white around his face to dark brown on his back. He had a predator’s build, with large forward-facing eyes set in a big, broad-jawed head. His rear legs were long and powerful; a striped tail, woven about with silver chain, curved between them. Where his distant ancestors would have had two middle-legs, Ziller had a single broad midlimb, partially covered by a dark waistcoat. His arms were much like a human’s, though covered in golden fur and ending in broad, six-digit hands more like paws.

• Look To Windward, Chapter 1 - Page 18

For referance Kabe is a three meter tall triped Homomdan.

KarlMrax

“There go the warps!” Xuss said, sounding excited. “See?”

Two arrowhead shapes, one on either side, detached from the knife missile’s body, swung out and disappeared. The monofilament wires which still attached each of the little warps to the knife missile were invisible. The view changed as the scout missile pulled back and up, showing almost the whole of the army ahead.

“I’ll get the knife to buzz the wires,” the drone said.

“What does that mean?”

KarlMrax

“They’re about an hour away,” said the machine floating to her left. The machine looked like a scruffy metal suitcase. It moved a little in the air, rotating and tipping as though looking up at the seated woman. “And anyway,” it continued, “you won’t see much at all with those museum pieces.” She put the glass down on the table again and lowered the binoculars. “They were my father’s,” she said.

“Really.” The drone made a sound that might have been a sigh.

A screen flicked into existence a couple of metres in front of the woman, filling half her field of view. It showed, from a point a hundred metres above and in front of its leading edge, an army of men - some mounted, most on foot - marching along another section of the desert highway, all raising

KarlMrax

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;

KarlMrax

Eventually a heavy maintenance unit, about the size of a human torso and escorted by a trio of small self-motivated effector side-arms appeared at the far end of the vertical companionway above it and floated down through the currents of climbing gas until they were directly over the small, pocked, smoking and splintered casing of the drone. The effector weapons’ aim had stayed locked onto the drone the whole way down.

Then one of the guns powered up and fired at the small machine.

Shit. Bit summary, dammit . . . the drone had time to think.

KarlMrax

Light, bursting from all around it and bearing the signature of plasma fire, drummed into its casing with what felt like the pressure of a small nuclear blast. Its fields mirrored what they could; the rest roasted the machine to white heat and started to seep inside its body, beginning to destroy its more vulnerable components. Still it held out, completing its roll through the superheated gases around it - mostly vaporised floor-tiles, it noted - dodging the shape spearing towards it that was its murderous twin, noticing (almost lazily, now) that the displacer pod had completed its power-up and was moving to clasp/discharge . . . while its mind involuntarily registered the information contained in the blast of radiation and finally caved in under the force of the alien purpose encoded within.

It felt itself split in two, leaving behind its real personality, giving that up to the invading power of