[capnq]

"Interesting picture," Soctu Timho commented, looking at the newest addition to CEO Davdi's office decor.

"It's an original Volsa," Davdi explained. "A birthday gift from Sanre." Silda Volsa's photographs of life in the alien world of the Eunwo colony had spawned a fad for surrealistic art among the Eifralo.

"It certainly must be strange to see plants growing out of a solid surface, rather than a hydroponics gel matrix. What are those people doing?"

"The title of the piece is 'Harvest Time'; apparently they're collecting some native crop. The plants produce a soft fiber that can be made into cloth; that's one of Eunwo's biggest exports. Sanre tells me that the plants are too fragile to use machinery to collect the pods, so it has to be done by hand."

"Oddly enough, that sort of connects to what I came by to tell you about," Timho grinned. "I've got good news about something that machines can do now. I may have a solution to the fighter pilot recruitment problem."

"That would be terrific! We haven't been able to get a commitment from the Cytherians to send pilots; they seem to be tied up with some kind of leadership crisis. What have you got?"

"We've made a lot of progress on miniaturizing computers; I've got a prototype of a semi-sentient system that only needs a third of the hardware that Node-25 uses. It's still not small enough to be practical for use in a fighter, but Gurse has designed a much larger vehicle that he calls a 'drone', which it can be used in."

"You said 'semi-sentient'; how does it perform compared to an Eifral fighter pilot?"

"It's not quite as agile; in fact, the system can't even handle docking manuevers after it's been launched. We had to sacrifice a lot of intelligence to get the size down. On the other hand, a drone can absorb a lot more punishment than a fighter; it takes several shots to destroy one. Node-25 is still working on simulations to figure out effective tactics for using them. Apparently, we've finally come up with something new that it doesn't already have an example of in its database."