After centuries, the call finally goes out. The ship's vast dish, retained on the design for just this purpose, passes the message inward. The redundant sets of coding systems are run through, the message authenticated, and passed to the AI. The AI runs over the message- it is brutal in its simplicity, compared to the effort in ensuring the message is recieved. "The war is over- mission abort." Glacially, the ship begins a final skew flip- all the better to return home for possible future use. She speaks: "this is Automatic Vessel 471 Indomitable, transmitting in the clear. We have received a verified abort message from Command." She only has enough time to realize that she's not hearing her own message back from the already-disabled dish before everything goes black.
