"Battleship? Pthththth!" Skippy made a raspberry sound. "No way! Those Thuranin pinheads were chasing their tails, I was programming microjumps closer than we needed just to screw with them. No, the Thuranin didn't pose any real danger, they're too predictable. What happened was while I was downloading data from the command ship, I detailed part of my processing capacity to skim through the data, and I learned that the Maxohlx are so alarmed about the Thuranin's military setbacks in this sector, they have assigned a Maxohlx cruiser to join the battlegroup."

"A Maxohlx starship?" Desai exclaimed. "Where was it?" The protocol was for Thuranin ships to appear green on the navigation displays, Kristang ships were red, Ruhar ships yellow, Jeraptha ships blue, and so on. The color for Maxolhx ships was orange. There wasn't been any orange symbols on the display.

"That's the problem, I didn't detect any Maxohlx ship in range. The Thuranin data indicates a Maxolhx cruiser joined the battlegroup two days ago, but it has been intermittently jumping away, and the Thuranin don't know where it is now. I am not confident in the ability of this ship's crappy sensors to detect a Maxohlx ship that has engaged its full stealth capabilities. At this point, I do not want to tangle with a Maxolhx warship, I am not sufficiently familiar with the Maxohlx current level of technology. It would be prudent, in the immediate future, to avoid Thuranin fleet concentrations. As soon as we can, we should perform a substantial jump to clear this area. The engines will have sufficient charge for a moderate jump in thirty seven minutes."

The stupid progress bar was killing me, it still only showed eight percent. "Did you get the data we need?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah, sure, no problem, I'm still skimming through it. We have a complete view of the disposition of Thuranin forces in the entire sector, future war plans, all the good stuff. With this, it will be easy to avoid them. Oh, and I also found confirmation the Thuranin are pulling back from Paradise, permanently, they're abandoning that entire wormhole cluster. It would have been an outlier to their main territory anyway, the Thuranin were never enthusiastic about retaking Paradise, that was a Kristang operation. It seems that because an Elder starship crashed on Paradise a long time ago, the Kristang were eager to resume searching for Elder technology. Too bad they didn't find anything useful the first time they had the planet. Hahahahaha! Stupid lizards."