Little of real import, it reckoned. There were thousands of studies on its own behaviour it had always meant to glance at; a million messages it had never looked into, a billion life-stories it had never seen through to the end, a trillion thoughts it had never followed up . . .

The ship kicked through the debris of its life, watching the towering wall of the Excession come ever closer.

It scanned the articles, features, studies, biographies and stories which had been written about itself and which it had collected. There were hardly any screen works and those which did exist needn’t have; nobody had ever succeeded in smuggling a camera aboard it. It supposed it ought to feel proud of that but it didn’t. The lack of any real visual interest hadn’t put people off; they’d found the ship and the articulation of its eccentricity quite entirely fascinating. A few commentators had even come close to the reality of the situation, putting forward the idea that the Sleeper Service was part of Special Circumstances and somehow Up To Something . . . but any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.

Next, the Sleeper Service picked through the immense stack of unanswered messages it had accumulated over the decades. Here were all the signals it had glanced at and found irrelevant, others it had completely ignored because they issued from craft it disliked, and a whole sub-set of those it had chosen to disregard in the weeks since it had set course for the Excession. The stored signals were by turns banal and ridiculous; ships trying to reason with it, people wanting to be allowed aboard without being Stored first, news services or private individuals wanting to interview it, talk to it . . . untold wastages of senseless drivel. It stopped even glancing at the signals and instead just scanned the first line of each.

Towards the end of the process, one message popped up from the rest, flagged as interesting by a name-recognising sub-routine. That single signal was followed by and linked to a whole series, all from the same ship; the Limited Systems Vehicle Serious Callers Only.

Regarding Gravious, was the first line.

The Sleeper Service’s interest was piqued. So was this the entity the treacherous bird had been reporting back to? It opened a fat import-file from the LSV, full of signal exchanges, file assignments, annotated thoughts, contextualisations, definitions, posited meanings, inferences, internalised conversations, source warranties, recordings and references.

And discovered a conspiracy.