It had to assume the expansion was not equidirectional. It still had its second front, the Affront’s war fleet, even if that was vastly less threatening than what it was faced with now. The Sleeper instructed its own warcraft to flee, to do all they could to escape the oncoming blast-front of the Excession’s inflation. If the distension was localised, some at least might escape; they had anyway been launched towards the Affronter fleet, not straight at the Excession. The Sleeper wondered with a fleeting sourness whether the bloating Excession - or whatever was controlling it - was capable of appreciating this distinction. Whatever, it was done; the warcraft were on their own for the moment.

Think. What had the Excession done up until now? What could it possibly be doing? What was it for? Why did it do what it did?

The GSV spent two entire seconds thinking.

(Back on the Jaundiced Outlook, that was long enough for the avatar Amorphia to interrupt Dajeil and say, ‘Excuse me. I beg your pardon, Dajeil. Ah, there’s been a development with the Excession . . .’)

Then the Sleeper swung its engine fields about, flourishing them into an entirely new configuration and instituting a crash-stop.

The giant ship poured every available unit of power it possessed into an emergency braking manoeuvre which threw up vast livid waves of disturbance in the energy grid; soaring tsunami of piled-up energies that rose and rose within the hyperspatial realm until they too threatened to tear into the skein itself and unleash those energies not witnessed in the galaxy for a half a thousand years. An instant before the wave fronts ripped into the fabric of real space the ship switched from one level of hyperspace to the other, ploughing its traction fields into the Ultraspace energy grid and producing another vast tumbling swell of fricative power.

The ship flickered between the two expanses of hyperspace, distributing the colossal forces at its command amidst each domain, hauling its velocity down at a rate barely allowed for in its design parameters while equally strained steering units edged their own performance envelopes in the attempt to turn the giant craft, angling it slowly ever further away from the centre.

For a moment, there was little enough to do. They were not sufficient to escape, but at least such actions made the point that it was trying to. All that could be done was being done. The Sleeper Service contemplated its life.

Have I done good, or bad? it thought. Well, or ill?