“Yeah! You even took your avatoid! We’re devastated! ”

“Yup. Sorry about that too”

“Just joshing anyway.”

“I know. No, just … one of those things, you know?”

“So, you’re … just looking at the orientation of the warp skein here … looks like you’re off to … no, we can’t tell. Open space by our reckoning.”

“Heck, can’t hide much from you guys,” the Mistake Not … replied, putting some heartiness into its synthesised voice (it had, naturally, an extensive knowledge of all Liseiden languages, dialects, accents, idioms and speech patterns). It was powering away as fast as it could, already curving away towards this Izenion place (it had no idea why). The rucking it had caused in the skein of real space, pointing in a completely different direction, represented pretty much standard procedure; you didn’t let people know where you were really heading unless there was a good reason.

“I bet,” the admiral said. “Soooo … bad news?”

The delay caused by increasing distance was already such that had the Mistake Not … been talking to another Mind or even AI, it would have switched to standard messaging by now. Talking to a creature whose faculties relied on a substrate where internal signals moved at roughly the speed of sound – an ordinary bio-brain – there was no need for this yet; the ship had plenty to process and think about while it waited for the animal-slow replies to trundle across the link, and even during the individual transmission sections.

Between the phonemes associated with the end of the word “bad” and the very start of the word “news”, for example, when it was already anticipating that the whole of the next word would indeed be “news”, and – from the inflection – that it would be the end of the sentence and probably the end of the signal parcel, it had had time to thoroughly research the Izenion system, re-analyse everything it knew about Gzilt and the current situation re the countdown to Subliming and everything else, and still come up with precisely no idea why it had been asked to endure a degree of engine deg-radation – however temporary – to get to Izenion as quickly as possible.

The request had come from its principal contact and old friend, the Kakistocrat, which had wanted to know if it would do this purely out of regard for it. The Kakistocrat had admitted that it had been given further detail regarding whatever situation was thought so important that a ship should be asked to do such a thing, but wanted to know more still before involving the Mistake Not … fully. It had also asked the Mistake Not … if it would agree to its specs being forwarded to the group dealing with whatever might be going on.