"Heaven-1, this is Dr. Doucette. Dr. Landers had asked me to keep you updated if he was unable to. Here’s the situation. We took the competition by surprise with our early launch, and even more so by your preemptive departure. The Chinese and USE ships are being rushed to completion and will launch within another week or two. The Brazilians have just launched two probes, and one of them is on the same course as you. Er, Dr. Landers wanted me to tell you we have good news and bad news. I’m assuming that’s a 21 st century colloquialism of some kind. The bad news is that the Brazilian ship is definitely armed with missiles similar to the two you avoided. Full specs to follow. The good news is that they seem to be only capable of about 1.25 g acceleration, unless they’re deliberately underplaying their hand."