"To travel to Incognita direct would take about fifteen days by the shortest route. We shall take eighteen days as we shall have to make a detour."
But presumably we shall take only fifteen days back. Hurrah we can spend a week round the planet and still be back in time for Commemoration. We shall skip maybe a million awkward questions and I shall not disappoint Dad.
It is plain the colonel is not filled with joy; far from it, he did not enjoy revealing a Departmental secret however obvious, but he likes the next item even less.
"We shall detour to an uninhabited system twelve days' transit time from here and make contact with another ship, the Gilgamesh."
At which Lennie DiMaggio who has been silent till now brings his fist down on the table and exclaims, "You can't!"
Lennie is much upset for some reason; Delano-Smith gives him a peculiar look and says what does he know about it? and Lennie starts to stutter.
Cray remarks that Lennie's childhood hobby appears to have been spaceships and he suffers from arrested development.
B says it is well known Lennie is mad about the Space Force and why not? It seems to have uses Go on and tell us Lennie.
Lennie says "G-Gilgamesh was lost three hundred years ago!"