So all it had done after the first exciting bit, when it had been the centre of attention and everybody had wanted to know all it could tell them about the thing it had found, had been to hang around here, still at the focus of events in a sense, but also feeling somehow ignored.

Reports. It filed reports. It had long since stopped trying to make them different or original.

The ship was bored. It was also aware of a continuing undercurrent of fear; a real emotion that it was by turns annoyed at, ashamed of and indifferent to, according to its mood.

It waited. It watched. Beyond it, around it, most of its small fleet of modules and satellites, a few of its most space-capable drones and a variety of specialist devices it had constructed specifically for the purpose also floated, watching and waiting. Inside the vessel its human crew discussed the situation, monitored the data coming in from the ship’s own sensors and those coming in from the small cloud of dispersed machines. The ship passed some of the time by making up elaborate games for the humans to play. Meanwhile it kept up its observation of the Excession and scanned the space around, waiting for the first of the other ships to arrive.

Sixteen days after the Culture craft had stumbled upon the Excession and six days after the discovery had been made public, the first ship appeared, its presence noted initially within the Fate Amenable To Change’s main sensor array. The GCU moved one state of readiness higher, signalled what was happening to the Ethics Gradient and the Not Invented Here, fastened its track scanner on the incoming signal, began a tentative reconfiguration of its remote sensor platforms and started to move towards the newcomer round the perimeter of the Excession’s safe limit at a speed it hoped was pitched nicely between polite deliberation and alarm-raising urgency. It sent a standard interrogatory signal burst to the approaching craft.

The vessel was the Sober Counsel, an Explorer Ship of the Zetetic Elench’s Stargazer Clan’s Fifth fleet. The Fate Amenable To Change felt relief; the Elench were friends.

Identifications completed, the two ships rendezvoused, locally stationary just a few tens of kilometres apart on the outskirts of the safe limit from the Excession the Culture vessel had set.

~ Welcome.

~ Thank you. . . . Dear holy stasis. Is that thing attached to the grid, or is it my sensors?

~ If it’s your sensors, it’s mine too. Impressive, isn’t it? Becomes greatly less so once you’ve sat looking at it for a week or two, take my word for it. I hope you’re just here to observe. That’s all I’m doing.

~ Waiting on the big guns?

~ That’s right.

~ When do they arrive?

~ That’s restricted. Promise this won’t go outside the Elench?

~ Promise.