It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it.

Finally one of them said, “Sir, we … may be approaching the sort of distance the Culture ship can start to read our comms.”

“This far out?”

“–encrypted, aren’t … isn’t it?”

“Precautionary principle applies, team. Officer?”

The obvious, inter-ship comms traffic ceased. The Mistake Not … considered dedicating an effector to the lead vessel to monitor it internally, but there was a tiny chance they might spot it doing so – a tiny chance increased by the possibility the fleet carried tech filched on earlier Scavenging sorties – so it didn’t.

Hours of patient waiting later, the Liseiden fleet of large, boxy-looking ships finally dragged itself into the Ry system, hauled up into a rather quaint orbit around the clinker sun with the warp-engine equivalent of loud clanks and clouds of black smoke, and – finally – rendezvoused officially with the Culture ship Mistake Not …

Effusive greetings of great solemnity and seemingly genuine friendliness flowed in both directions.

It was while all this was going on and the avatoid eel was being puttered across to the fleet flagship in an antique shuttle brought along specially for the purpose that one of the Mistake Not …’s multitudinous sub-routines – this one charged with deep analysis of recent HS sensor data by opportunistic triangulation following significant movement within any given real space reference frame – flagged the tiniest of oddities.

It was timed, originally, just over twenty-two hours earlier and it was located some centuries away, about a quarter of the distance round the boundary of the rough sphere of stars and space that held the Gzilt volume of influence. Specifically, it had taken place within the colossal, slow-tumbling clouds and wastes and veils of light marking the Yampt-Sferde supernova: the pretty one it had noticed earlier whose real light had yet to get here. Somewhere inside the vast, escaping fires of the nebula there had been a microscopic flare of radiation displaying an unusual, even anomalous signature spectrum.

Suddenly in proper, no-nonsense combat-grade Mind-thinking time, while the transfer shuttle moved a few nanometres towards its destination, the AI cores on the Liseiden flagship slept deeply between cycles and the Liseiden themselves would have appeared frozen and silent even observing them on a scale of subjective years, the Mistake Not … watched the sub-routine’s resulting attention-cascade briefly suck in and focus other computational assetry on the data, rapidly producing all the available analysis it was presently possible to compile on the subject.

The anomaly – so faint, far away and overwhelmed by the seething turmoil of energies all around it as to be only very ambiguously weapon-blink – looked like it was centred quite precisely on the artificially maintained planetary fragment called Ablate, where the Gzilt had some sort of ceremonial facility.

… Oh-oh, thought the Culture ship.