xExplorer Ship Break Even (Zetetic Elench, Stargazer, 5th)
oGCU Fate Amenable To Change (Culture)

Greetings. Please be advised I and my sister craft the Within Reason and Long View are also in attendance, just out of your primary scanner range. We have reconfigured to an Extreme Offence back-up form and shall soon be joined by the two remaining ships of our fleet, similarly recast. We would hope that you do not intend any interference with the plan our sister craft Appeal To Reason intends to effect.

Two other, confirmatory signals came in from divergent angles compared to that first message, purporting to be from the Within Reason and the Long View.

Shit, thought the GCU. It had been reasonably confident it could either fool the two nearby Elench craft or just plain overpower their efforts to contact the Excession, but faced with five ships, three of them on a war footing, it knew it would never be able to prevail.

It replied, saying that of course it intended no mischief, and glumly watched events unfold.

The vote aboard the Appeal To Reason went the same way as before, though a few more humans did vote against the idea of sending the drone in than had the last time. Two requested an immediate transfer to the Sober Counsel, then changed their minds; they would stay aboard. The Fate took its avatars off both the Elencher ships. It had used its heavy-duty displacer for the task, attenuating it to make it look as though it had utilised one of the lesser systems. It left the unit running at full readiness.

The Appeal To Reason’s drone was duly launched; a small, fragile-looking, gaily adorned thing, its extremities sporting ribbons, flowers and little ornaments and its casing covered with drawings, cartoons and well-wishing messages scrawled by the crew. It puttered hesitantly towards the Excession, chirpily beaming signals of innocent goodwill.

If the Fate Amenable To Change had been a human, at this point it would have looked down, put one hand over its eyes, and shaken its head.

The small machine took minutes to creep up to the seemingly unnoticing Excession’s dull skein-surface; an insect crawling up to a behemoth. It activated a short-range, one time hyperspace unit and disappeared from the skein as though passing through a mirror of dark fluid.

In Infraspace, it . . . disappeared too, for an instant.

The Fate Amenable To Change was watching the drone from a hundred different angles via its remotes. They all saw it just disappear. An instant later it reappeared. It looped back through its little quantum burrow, returning to the skein of real space to start back, no less hesitantly, towards the Appeal To Reason.

The Fate Amenable To Change crash-ramped its plasma chambers then isolated and readied a clutch of fusion warheads. At the same moment, it signalled urgently.

~ Was the drone meant to disappear that way?

~ Hmm, sent the Appeal To Reason. ~ Well . . .

~ Destroy it, the Fate urged. ~ Destroy it, now!