The Killing Time was a Torturer-class Rapid Offensive Unit of The Culture. It participated in the conflict surrounding the Excession.
Personality[]
Its name was a pun on the expression that 99% of war is just killing time, while the rest is the killing time.
The Ship displayed a strict adherence to military discipline except when it felt it had been tricked and betrayed by the LOU Attitude Adjuster.
Excession[]
During the events of Excession the ship sent a module to approach the ship store at Pittance to ascertain its condition. The module was destroyed by Pittance's defences, taken over by the Affront and the Attitude Adjuster, as it approached. This revealed the ruse the Affront and the Attitude Adjuster were attempting and the Killing Time quickly left the immediate volume to get the word out. Once it had reported its findings it requested it be able to seek revenge against the Attitude Adjuster and pushed itself to a significant degradation level to achieve this. It managed to locate the fleet that had been awoken at Pittance and searched it for the Attitude Adjuster, being briefly fooled when the Attitude Adjuster told the Minds of the Pittance ships it had tricked to mimic itself. The Killing Time then correctly identified the Attitude Adjuster and interrogated it with its effector, seeking the names of the other ships responsible for the conspiracy, extracting the mind-state of Gestra Ishmethit, and unsuccessfully trying to convince it to call off the attack. It then forced the Attitude Adjuster to confront its own feelings of inadequacy and responsibility for a giga-death crime, inducing tremendous guilt that drove the ship to kill itself by directing its engine fields into its own Mind. The Killing Time then destroyed 3 more of the Pittance ships, before returning to the Excession to assist in the Culture defence there.[1]