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'You're the same make as vi!Cari,' she said.

AM!xitsa's face icon simulated an amused expression. 'I'm the original,' it said. 'Vi!Cari was part of the second batch of militarized defensives.'

'But you've got the same capabilities?'

'All of us have our strengths and weaknesses,' said aM!xitsa. 'It's less a question of what you've got than of what you do with them. I'm sorry, did I say something funny?'

Roz shook her head, sipping the coffee to hide her smile.

'I'm geared more towards remote sensing and point defence,' said aM!xitsa. 'Drones like vi!Cari were produced at the start of the war, primarily to provide forward and aggressive defensive postures.'

'So you never actually attacked anyone,' said Roz. 'You just defended yourselves in an aggressive manner.'

'Towards the end of the war we did have to pre-emptively defend ourselves because our enemies got a bit wary about attacking us.'

'Could you, hypothetically speaking, have pre-emptively defended yourself against vi!Cari?'

AM!xitsa's face ikon went interestingly blank. 'That would depend. I'd have to have the element of surprise and even so the fireworks would have been pretty spectacular. The blow-back from vi!Cari's shields would have produced at least a six-gigawatt flash, even with suppressors. That sort of thing tends to attract God's attention.'

'Do drones keep their shields up all the time?' asked Roz.

'That's a very personal question,' said aM!xitsa.

'This is a murder inquiry.'

'Really,' said aM!xitsa. 'I thought you didn't consider the destruction of a machine as murder.'

'Who told you that?'

'KiKhali.'

'When?'

'One point three seconds ago.'

'Tell it to mind its own business,' said Roz. 'Have you told it?'

'KiKhali says you are the rudest person it's ever met.'

'That's a shame,' said Roz. 'I cry myself to sleep at night over my lack of manners. I'm a simple kind of woman, aM!xitsa. I play by the rules: you people say it's murder, so it's murder. What I think doesn't matter, does it?'

'But we don't have rules, or laws,' said aM!xitsa.

'You have a general consensus on morality?'

'Yes.'

'Then you have rules.'

'That's an interesting argument.'

'No, it isn't,' said Roz. 'Are there any circumstances under which vi!Cari would have had his shields down, or in standby mode?'

'Shields can interfere with certain scanning modes,' said aM!xitsa. 'If vi!Cari was looking for something it might have shut down everything except its core integrity shield. It would have to be looking for something very small, down at the submolecular level.'

'You know the Doctor's theory?'

'I do now,' said aM!xitsa. 'Yes, it would work. He's got a devious mind, that Doctor.'

'You don't know the half of it.'

'God scanned the area pretty thoroughly after the storm. There was nothing out there for vi!Cari to be looking for.'

'Unless it got washed away,' said Roz. Washed away? She scratched the invisible scar under her breast. Why is that important? She had a nagging sense that her unconscious was putting things together behind her back. Policeman's nose, adjudicator's hunch, the little itch in the scar that wasn't there. Perhaps vi!Cari only thought there was something to find, something that had been washed away? Or perhaps it had been washed out to sea?

'I've made you some breakfast,' said aM!xitsa.

A serving tray hovered by her elbow. Damn. Lost it. 'What's this?'

'That's grain porridge, that's fried strips of meat and boiled avian embryos,' said aM!xitsa.

'Tuck in, you need the protein.'

Roz was tempted to tell aM!xitsa that she hadn't eaten breakfast since she was a novice but then she realized how hungry she was. Ignoring the porridge she started on the bacon and eggs.

'Some bread with this would be nice.'

The bread took another minute to arrive.

'Tell me,' said Roz, ripping off a crust and dipping it into the yolk, 'why haven't you machines taken over?'

AM!xitsa sounded surprised. 'Taken over what?'

'The sphere, the galaxy, everything,' said Roz.

'What would be the point?'

Roz explained between