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Lures. You can see four, maybe even five dozen, all throughout the bulkhead.
The position and the angle of the hatch does not make it a good window – and between that and the darkness, you cannot make out too much of what is in the room. But you can see the lines now, the cables attached to the little lights. And in the limited window provided by the hatch, you can see that the cables begin to converge on one point, out of sight on the ceiling of the room.
It <span class="mu-i">is</span> just one drone. And if it is big enough to operate all of these lines at once, then it must be <span class="mu-i">huge</span>!
Recalling how the drone you captured behaved before you inadvertently roused it, you wait a solid half-minute, to see if there is a massive beam of light that blazes down from the ceiling without seeing anything. There isn’t any … but if anything, that makes you more anxious, because without a frame of reference for how the drone is going to react, you are in uncharted waters. And this fucking angler has a shitload of lures in that water …
You get your radio back on and switch it to directional broadcast. While you might not be able to see the drone from the safety of the hatch, you might be able to speak to it. God, you hope you can.
"Start of Line. Range of address, two hundred cubits. Target of address … ‘Stalk-Softly’. Purpose of address, power down lights. Time of address, effective immediately. End of Line."
None of the little lights around the room go out. You swear violently under your breath, and you actually have to stop yourself from kicking the blast door in frustration. This isn’t just a failure – this is a dangerously ambiguous failure. The broadcast might not have reached the receiver-transmitter package on the drone in a state where it could be interpreted as instructions in Primitive … but it just as easily could have won through and been successfully interpreted, then rejected out of hand because you got the name wrong after all. Further muddying things, it is possible that the message got through <span class="mu-i">and</span> you did get the name right after all … but the lights remained on because the lures were all self-contained and powered.
You suppose that you could try again, and tell the drone to spool in all, to see if the lures are hauled up or not. For that matter, you could try addressing it as ‘Brier-Softly’, ‘Tread-Softly’ or any other name you can come up with. It couldn’t hurt – unless this thing has a coffle-breaker protocol written in. For valuable drones with offensive capabilities, mechanists and programmers will sometimes write in contingencies for what to do if someone repeatedly attempts and fails to slave the drone by re-writing code, which typically involve targeting the source of the attack. Typically, it is reserved for combat drones, but as such effort was given to correctly conveying the name of the drone, you have to wonder.
