Its charge, which had been the committed acceleration of a twelve-foot predator moving toward a target it had identified as eliminable, became something else.
The movement continued. The Harvester was still moving, still aimed at the bee, still committed to the objective it had calculated as the only viable path back to the operational configuration that several years of this facility had established as normal.
But the movement was happening at ten percent of the speed it had been happening at outside the cone's volume, every centimeter of progress requiring the time that a meter would normally require, the committed charge reduced to the agonizing crawl of something moving through a medium that had decided to be substantially more resistant than air and was enforcing that decision completely.
The Harvester was slow.
This was the most significant development in several years of this facility's operational history and it deserved a moment of acknowledgment.
