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contained a sole task: to seek out an undamaged jet engine of a given configuration, dismount it and report the fact to the crew.
    So far, the search had been unsuccessful. The robot wasn't interested in anything happening around, and even the only video camera attached to its spiderlike body was turned off. And that was a mistake. Its motion was noticed by something hidden inside the sinister gloom of halls and passages, in gaps between spacecraft, on landing decks crumpled by nuclear strikes; its appearance awoke some activity.
    Thousands of battle machines had waited in the cold and stillness of the vacuum for their zero hour. The LEDs under the "activation" inscriptions on their control panels had been gleaming red for many months. They were ready to start fighting when the tremendous explosion of the annihilated planet liquidated both space fleets, reducing the powerful interstellar spaceships to scrap. But most battle machines had remained functional.
    They had lost their commanders. Since the moment of their activation no instructions had been received from the base spacecraft' computing centers. But every robot was controlled by an autonomous program started automatically after a definite period of time.
    The machines were too expensive and sophisticated for people to allow them to stay idle. A huge experience of wars had been used when programming the robots. A risk of loss of the officers or even of the whole sub-unit operating this or that battle machine had been foreseen. Then the autonomous program was run. Its functioning was based on the recognition of the "friend-foe" signal. All objects not signaling "friend" were automatically registered as targets. After that, priorities were determined, depending on the level of their activity. Finally, a standard warning and an offer to surrender were transmitted.
    In case the "friend" signal was not detected after those steps, or the activity of the object didn't become nullified — a phase of active operations was actuated, and the battle machine started to fulfill its main function: the destruction of the enemy fighting equipment and men.
    This phase could be suspended or interrupted in the following three cases:
    After destruction of all targets.
    Upon receiving an order from the command post to stop military operations.
    After having spent the total of ammunition load and energy resources.
    It goes without saying that those who had designed the battle machines had not foreseen such an improbable coincidence of circumstances when all command centers of the belligerents would be entirely destroyed. Thousands of activated battle machines and their quite functional autonomous programs waited for their hour to come.
    Any target could serve as the first little stone to provoke an avalanche.
    The running robot was that little stone.
     
    * * *
     
    Andrei was in a very bad mood
    He had scanned the entire memory of the onboard computer but found nothing similar to the orbital fortress. Neither wreck matched the profile he'd entered in the computer's memory. Consequently, his father was alive. It was the orbital station that had the weapon on board which had destroyed the planet.
    At that particular moment Andrei didn't care about the fact that an annihilation installation did exist. All that has been predicted and based on theory was sooner or later implemented. The colonists had created the new weapon and used it at the critical moment of the battle to annihilate the fleet of Earth.
    Correction: hundreds of battered colonist's spacecraft then fighting in space had been sacrificed to win the Pyrrhic victory.
    Thousands of desperately combating soldiers had been swept away into a nuclear vortex by the decision of a few men among whom was his father. Perhaps Andrei could find enough moral force inside himself to justify that act — if the superior officers had shared a common fate to avoid their planets being bombarded, or if they had at least sent some rescue spaceships