Three datapads lay face-down on the console, their screens dark. Sera had turned them over twenty minutes ago — the same reports she'd read yesterday, the same slow arithmetic of loss that had become the texture of her mornings for six months.
She turned the first one face-up.
Frontier Sector Seven: Portal tree at Verath's Crossing confirmed dead. Stabilizer node deployed to compensate. Estimated coverage gap: fourteen hours before full integration. Civilian evacuation of dependent settlements proceeding.
The second.
Unbound strike on Relay Station Keth-4. Voidborn interdiction engaged — two of three attack vectors neutralized. Third vector penetrated. Stabilizer array damaged. Seventeen casualties. Repair crews en route. Estimated downtime: six days.
The third.
Stabilizer production report: Thirty-one units deployed this quarter. Twenty-eight required to replace losses from Unbound strikes and portal degradation. Net gain: three. Projected demand next quarter: forty-four.
Three stabilizers. That was the margin. Three devices standing between the coalition's defensive line and a gap that would swallow another sector's worth of portal integrity. Three, against a weapon at the center of the galaxy that never stopped broadcasting, never paused.
Sera set the datapad down and pressed her thumb against the bridge of her nose. The gesture had become habitual — she caught herself doing it in corridors, in briefings, in the moments between sleep and waking when her mind was already running numbers before her eyes opened.
Crimson shifted against her thigh, a low burn of restless heat. Not words — just the sensation of something caged pacing.
She understood the feeling.
The council chamber stretched around her, empty for another forty minutes before the session convened. The room had been a cargo bay once, aboard the coalition's mobile command station — a repurposed dreadnought that served as neutral ground for factions that couldn't agree on whose territory to meet in. The conversion showed. Support struts still bore their industrial markings. The curved walls held tactical displays bolted over hull plating that had never been designed for aesthetics. A long oval table dominated the center, surrounded by seats of varying design — high-backed for the Dragon Sovereignty delegates, reinforced for the Fae Concordat's armored envoys, standard-issue for the human factions, and several that defied easy categorization for the species whose names Sera still occasionally mispronounced.
The room smelled like recycled air and old metal, with the faint ozone residue of too many communication arrays running in too small a space.
Home, for the last six months. Or close enough.
Sera stood at the head of the table, her palms flat on its surface, and let herself feel the weight before anyone arrived to see her carry it. Five tattoos moved against her skin — Crimson's restless heat on her left thigh, Gold's patient warmth on her right, Azure's wings across her shoulder blades, Vexis winding along her right forearm, Nyx's geometric stillness on her left. All five present. All five aware. The full court, convened in the quiet before the storm.
Gold stirred — not with words, but with the focused warmth that meant he was already assessing the room's tactical layout, the sight lines, the position of the portal link console at the far end of the table.
She touched her pendant. The crystal was warm against her sternum, as it always was — warmer when the portal link was active, warmer still when Marcus was on the other end. A compass that pointed toward people she loved across impossible distances. She'd worn it every day since Elena pressed it into her hands, and the chain had become so familiar against her collarbone that she no longer felt it until it was gone.
Elena. Eight years dead, and Sera still reached for the pendant when she needed steadying. Some anchors never lifted.
The woman who had captained a salvage hauler — who had pulled scrap from derelicts and called it a living, who had known Prime and Pip and the Morningstar and nothing else — that woman would not have recognized this room. Would not have recognized the posture Sera wore now: shoulders squared, chin level, the bearing of someone who had learned that standing straight was not vanity but necessity, because people watched how you held yourself before they listened to what you said.
Four books of crisis had built that posture. Four books of loss and discovery and war had stripped away everything that wasn't load-bearing and left behind a woman who could silence a room by choosing to speak. The distance was in her shoulders, in the set of her jaw, in the way she read casualty reports with a stillness that would have frightened her younger self.
Prime stood near the chamber's main entrance, his dark chassis catching the overhead lights in long reflections — glossy black surface, gold accent lines tracing the architecture of his frame, blue energy channels at the elevated intensity that had become his baseline since the war began. The sustained hum of a system that hadn't fully powered down in months.
He watched her the way he always did when she thought she was alone — the quiet attention of someone cataloging the distance between what she showed and what she carried. He didn't ask if she was alright. He never did, when the answer was obvious. Instead, he tilted his head — left, the concern tilt, the one she'd learned to read across four years of partnership — and the warmth at his sternum brightened a fraction.
I see you. I'm here.
She gave him a nod. It was enough. It had been enough for a long time.
The first delegates began arriving twelve minutes early — the Dragon Sovereignty representatives, because Thornwick had instilled in them the belief that punctuality was a form of respect and tardiness a declaration of war. They filed in: scaled faces, formal bearing, the stiffness of people who had been arguing about strategy for six months and had run out of new ways to say the same things.
Behind them, the Fae Concordat's delegation. Then the human factions — three of them, because humanity could not face extinction without first subdividing into committees. Then the others, the coalition's smaller members, species whose portal networks were failing and whose options had narrowed to this room and the people in it.
They took their seats. She knew their arguments before they made them. She had heard every variation, every passionate case for a strategy that addressed the symptoms and ignored the disease. Six months of council sessions had given her a map of every faction's position, every delegate's priorities, every fault line in an alliance held together by the shared knowledge that the alternative was dying alone.
Crimson's heat flared — impatience, frustration, the banked fury of a fire dragon who had spent half a year defending instead of attacking. Sera felt it in her left thigh like a muscle cramp, hot and insistent.
She let it burn. Crimson wasn't wrong. Defense was necessary and insufficient — and the argument she was about to make lived in that gap.
When the last delegate settled — a Concordat envoy who made a point of arriving precisely on time, neither early nor late, because the Fae understood that timing was a language — Sera straightened from the console and addressed the room.
"Six months ago, we formed this coalition to address the Unbound threat and stabilize the dimensional barrier." Her voice carried without effort. She'd learned projection in council chambers, not classrooms — learned it the way you learn anything in war, by necessity. "I want to be honest about where we stand."
She activated the central display. Numbers filled the air above the table — portal losses, stabilizer deployments, strike frequencies, the slow red creep of barrier degradation mapped across a galactic chart.
"In six months, we have lost forty-three portal trees. Forty-three. Each one represents a permanent reduction in barrier integrity that we cannot reverse. Portal trees do not regrow on any timeline that matters to us." She let the number sit. Forty-three. Some of the delegates had heard it before. Hearing it again didn't make it smaller. "Our stabilizer network has deployed one hundred and twelve units in the same period. Of those, eighty-four were replacements for units destroyed or degraded by Unbound strikes and cascading portal failures. Net gain: twenty-eight stabilizers across six months of maximum production."
"The Voidborn countermeasures are working," said Delegate Ashara, Dragon Sovereignty, before Sera had finished. Ashara was the defensive faction's most articulate voice — a copper-scaled strategist who believed in walls and patience with the conviction of someone who had never watched a wall fail slowly enough to mistake the falling for standing. "Unbound strike frequency is down thirty-one percent since deployment. The stabilizer network is holding. The system works."
"The system is a tourniquet," Sera said. "And the patient is still bleeding."
She advanced the display. New numbers: production rates, resource allocation, the percentage of coalition output now dedicated to stabilizer manufacturing and Voidborn deployment. The percentage was large. It had been growing every quarter.
"Every stabilizer we build is a ship we don't. Every Voidborn unit deployed to intercept an Unbound strike is a unit not available for anything else. We are pouring our resources into maintaining a holding pattern, and the holding pattern is not holding. It is slipping. Three stabilizers. That is our net gain this quarter. Three."
"Then we hit them harder," said Commander Reth, human faction, Coalition Defense Force. Reth was the aggressive faction's champion — a career officer who had been fighting the Unbound since before the coalition existed and who believed, with the fervor of a man who had buried too many soldiers, that the only answer to an enemy was a fist. "We know where their staging areas are. We take the fight to them. Disrupt their operations at the source. Every strike we prevent is a stabilizer we don't need to replace."
"We've run those scenarios," Prime said from his position near the wall. His voice was even, precise — the analytical counterweight Sera relied on when the debate needed numbers instead of passion. "Offensive operations against known Unbound positions reduce strike frequency by an estimated twelve to eighteen percent in the short term. Within three months, they relocate and adapt. Net strategic gain over a six-month horizon: negligible. Resource cost: significant."
Reth's jaw tightened. He didn't argue.
Gold's presence threaded through Sera's awareness — not words, but the steady warmth of strategic assessment confirming what she already knew. The defensive position bought years. The aggressive position bought months. Neither stopped the weapon.
The debate cycled. It always cycled. Ashara made the case for expanding the stabilizer network — more production, wider coverage, buy more time. Reth pushed for targeted strikes — disrupt the Unbound, reduce the pressure, create breathing room. A Concordat delegate whose name translated roughly as "Speaks-in-Branches" argued for a combined approach — defense and offense in concert, each supporting the other. It was the most reasonable position in the room, and it was still wrong, because it still assumed the war could be won by fighting it.
Sera let them run. Across four books of crisis, people needed to voice their positions before they could hear anyone else's. The council needed to exhaust the familiar arguments before it could absorb an unfamiliar one. She stood at the head of the table and listened and waited — Crimson's impatience like a coal in her thigh, Gold's patience like a hand on her shoulder, the pendant warm against her chest — until the cycle completed and the room arrived at the silence that always followed, the silence of people who knew they were repeating themselves.
Into that silence, Sera spoke.
"We can defend every portal from here to the Rim and it won't matter." Her voice was quiet. The room stilled. "The weapon is still broadcasting. The barrier is still dying. Fifteen to twenty years — that's the estimate with our stabilizers in place. Without them, faster. We are buying time." She paused. "Time is not a strategy. Time without a plan is just slower dying."
No one spoke. The number — fifteen to twenty years — was not new. But framed against the net gain of three stabilizers per quarter, it landed differently. The math was simple. The math was terminal.
"We stop the source," Sera said, "or we lose everything."
"The galactic core is unreachable," Ashara said. She had made it before. "Hyperspace routes collapse within the Singularity Region. Normal-space approach would take decades and cross through territory the Unbound have held since before we knew they existed. The weapon's location is a fortress by geography. We have discussed this."
"We have," Sera said. "And I have a proposal that changes the discussion." She turned to the portal link console at the far end of the table. "Six months ago, we established a stabilized communication link with Dr. Marcus Drakenhart in the source dimension. In the time since — four years, by his subjective experience — he has been mapping the source dimension's geography and studying the device from the other side. He has a proposal for the council."
She activated the portal link.
The console hummed. Light gathered above it — not a hologram, not a projection, but a window. The air above the console rippled and then clarified into a view of somewhere else entirely. Warmer light. Fluid, shifting illumination that didn't behave like any light source in normal space. And in that light, a man.
Marcus Drakenhart looked back at the council through the dimensional gulf.
Sera's fingers tightened on the edge of the table. She had spoken to her father dozens of times through this link over the past months — fragmented conversations, data exchanges, the careful communication of two people separated by the membrane between realities. She knew what to expect. It never prepared her.
He was further changed. The source-glow in his skin had deepened — a glow that lived beneath the surface, as if the source dimension's light had worked into him at the cellular level. His irises had fractured into blues and greens and golds that shouldn't have coexisted in human tissue, shifting as the light moved. The veins along his temples and throat were brighter than the last time she'd seen him, tracing paths that looked less like blood vessels and more like circuitry drawn by something that thought in light instead of electricity.
He was still her father. The jawline, the shape of his hands, the way he held his head slightly tilted when he was about to speak. But the container was changing, and the man inside was changing with it.
"Council members," Marcus said. "Thank you for your time."
His voice came through the portal link with a slight distortion — not mechanical, not a transmission artifact, but the roughened quality of sound crossing a dimensional boundary. Underneath the distortion, his cadence had shifted. She cataloged it — the way a daughter catalogs every change in a parent she cannot reach. His pauses fell in different places. The rhythm of his sentences had loosened, as if the source dimension's relationship with time had seeped into his speech the way its light had seeped into his skin. When he was presenting data — organized, rehearsed, the fluent delivery of a scientist who had prepared — the strangeness receded. When he paused between thoughts, it returned, and in those gaps Sera heard four years of solitude in a place where the rules of duration bent.
Some of the council members reacted to his appearance. Ashara recoiled slightly. The Concordat envoy went carefully blank. Reth stared. Her father's transformation was not their business. His data was.
"I'll be direct," Marcus said. "The war of attrition you're fighting cannot be won. The mathematics are clear from the source dimension side — the resonance cascade is not degrading. It is not weakening. The weapon at the galactic core is operating at full capacity, and it will continue to do so until it is stopped or until the dimensional barrier fails completely. Your stabilizers are extraordinary engineering, and they are insufficient. They were always going to be insufficient. The weapon was designed to outlast any countermeasure that doesn't address it directly."
He paused — one of those strange pauses, a beat too long, as if he'd momentarily lost track of which dimension's sense of time he was operating in. Then he continued, and the presentation mode returned.
"For the past four years, I have been mapping the source dimension's topology — its geography, its hazards, its relationship to normal space. The source dimension is not a mirror of our universe. Distances here are fluid. Spatial relationships that are fixed in normal space are negotiable in the source dimension. Two points that are separated by tens of thousands of light-years in normal space may be separated by days or weeks of travel in the source dimension, depending on the local topology."
The central display shifted. Marcus's data replaced the coalition's war maps — dimensional charts, topological models, route projections rendered in the warm light of the source dimension's own illumination. Four years of work, meticulous and thorough, the output of a physicist who had refused to stop working even when the dimension he was working in was rewriting his biology.
"I have charted a route," Marcus said. "From a viable entry point in normal space, through the source dimension, to a position corresponding to the galactic core. The journey through the source dimension would take weeks. Not decades. Weeks."
The room absorbed this. Delegates stopped shuffling papers. The arguments paused. For six months, the galactic core had been an abstraction. An unreachable point on a map. A problem with no solution except patience and prayer. Marcus had just made it a destination.
""The route crosses territory I have mapped remotely but not traversed," Marcus continued. "The source dimension is lethal to unshielded travelers — field stabilizers would be required, and they have limits. I have detected signatures consistent with Unbound activity in the source dimension. The risks are real. I will not minimize them."
He paused again. The strange pause. Sera watched his eyes through the portal link — the iridescent shift catching the source dimension's light, making his gaze look like something underwater.
"But the alternative is clear," he said. "The bypass is dangerous. The war of attrition is fatal. Those are your options."
Questions followed. The council members engaged with Marcus's data the way they engaged with everything — skeptically, thoroughly, with the intensity of people who had been handed hope after months of managing decline. The Concordat envoy asked about source dimension lethality thresholds. Reth asked about the Unbound signatures. Ashara asked about the entry point — where, how defended, how far from the front lines.
Marcus answered each question with the precision of a man who had rehearsed this presentation for years. Because he had. Four years of preparation, four years of mapping and measuring and building the case, and Sera could hear it in the fluency of his responses — the data organized, the objections anticipated, the answers ready. His rehearsal showed in the science. In the gaps between the science, his strangeness showed.
Prime's posture shifted as Marcus's data came through — his head tilted right with each new figure, the blue warmth at his sternum brightening. He didn't interrupt. His assessment would come later, in the quiet between Sera and him, where the real decisions were made.
Nyx stirred on Sera's left forearm. Not words — Nyx almost never used words — but a shift in the geometric patterns of the tattoo, a deepening of the violet that Sera had learned to read as attention. Void-sense recognizing the territory Marcus described. The source dimension was Nyx's domain, and Nyx was listening.
Gold's assessment threaded through: viable. Viable. The first strategic option in six months that addressed the root cause instead of the symptoms.
The debate shifted — the tectonic movement of a room full of people adjusting their positions from "whether" to "how." Not unanimous. Not without resistance. But the gravity of the conversation had changed, and even the skeptics were now arguing about logistics rather than feasibility.
Forty minutes later, the council voted. Not unanimously — the Concordat envoy abstained, citing the need for internal consultation, and one of the human factions registered a formal objection that was more procedural than substantive. But the majority held. The source dimension bypass was endorsed as the coalition's primary strategic objective.
Sera stood at the head of the table and watched the vote tally register on the display. Direction. After six months of holding a line that was always moving backward, the coalition had a path forward.
It was enough. For now, it was enough.
The session ended. Delegates rose, conversations fragmenting into smaller clusters — the immediate aftermath of a strategic decision, when the people who voted begin processing what they've committed to. Sera exchanged words with Ashara, who wanted assurances about continued stabilizer production during the expedition's planning phase. She spoke briefly with Reth, who was already thinking about escort force composition. She nodded to the Concordat envoy, who nodded back with the careful neutrality of someone who would support the decision once their internal politics aligned.
The room emptied in stages. Prime remained near the entrance, a steady presence she was aware of without looking — the way she was aware of gravity, or the pendant's warmth, or the five voices in her skin. He would wait. He always waited.
The last delegate left. The door sealed. The chamber held only Sera, the empty seats, the dark tactical displays, and the portal link console, still active, still casting its warm source-dimension light across the table.
Marcus was still there.
Sera walked to the console. Her boots were quiet on the deck plating. The room was too large with only her in it — thirty empty seats, the silence after hours of debate pressing in.
She stopped in front of the portal link. Her father looked back at her from the other side of reality.
The presentation mode was gone. His posture had shifted. The scientist's precision was still there in the set of his shoulders, but beneath it, something softer. Something that looked like her father instead of Dr. Marcus Drakenhart, coalition asset, source dimension expert.
"You did well," he said. His voice through the link was intimate now, the distortion somehow gentler at lower volume. "The council needed that push. You gave it to them."
"They needed a direction," Sera said. "You gave them that."
"We gave them that." A pause — the strange pause, the one that belonged to another dimension's clock. His eyes held hers through the portal link, and the iridescent shift in his irises caught the light and scattered it. "Sera."
The way he said her name. Not Serafina — not the formal version, not the queen's name. Sera. The name he'd called her when she was eight years old and he was still just her father, before he disappeared into a dimension that was rewriting him molecule by molecule.
"I need to tell you something," he said. "Not the council. You."
She gripped the edge of the console. The metal was cool under her fingers. "I'm listening."
"I know what the device is." His voice was careful now — each word placed with the deliberation of someone who had carried these sentences alone for a very long time and was finally setting them down. "I've studied it from the other side for four years. The resonance cascade, the barrier degradation, the way it interacts with the dimensional membrane — I understand it now. All of it."
Four years. Four years alone in a dimension that was changing him, studying a weapon that was killing everything she was trying to protect. Four years of data and observation and the loneliness of a man who could see the answer forming and had no one to tell.
"And I know how to stop it," he said.
The words sat in the empty chamber. The recycled hum of the station filled the silence. Her father knew how to stop the weapon that was destroying the dimensional barrier. After six months of war and years of searching, he had the answer.
Her grip tightened on the console edge.
"How?" she said.
Marcus held her gaze. The source-glow in his skin was brighter than she'd ever seen it — not the diffuse glow of their earlier conversations, but something concentrated, as if the light had gathered closer to the surface. His eyes were steady. Iridescent and strange and steady.
"The same way you stop any phase boundary," he said. "You dissolve it."
A beat.
"But someone has to be the bridge."
Silence.
The portal link hummed between them — the low, constant frequency of a connection held open across the membrane between dimensions. The source dimension's light played across Marcus's face, warm and fluid, and his eyes held hers with a calm that did not belong in this conversation.
Sera knew calm. She had seen it in soldiers — in the ones who volunteered for the missions that everyone understood were one-way. In pilots who ran the numbers and accepted them and went quiet. She had seen it in people who had finished the part of the process that involved choice.
"Someone," she said. The word came out smaller than she intended.
"Someone," Marcus repeated. He didn't elaborate. The silence after the word was full — full of everything he was not saying, everything he had carried alone for however long it had taken him to find the calm that was now looking at her through a dimensional window.
Vexis stirred on her right forearm. A flicker of analytical attention — precise, quiet, catching on the word like a thorn catching fabric. Someone. Not something. Not a mechanism. Not a device. Someone.
Sera opened her mouth. Closed it. The questions were there — dozens of them, the physicist's daughter's questions, the queen's questions. What does dissolving a phase boundary mean? What does being the bridge require? Who? How? What does it cost?
She didn't ask them. Marcus's eyes held hers through the portal link, steady.
"Dad," she said.
His expression shifted — a fracture in the calm, brief and quickly sealed. He'd heard the word. Not "Marcus." Not "Doctor." Dad. And it had cost him something to hear it, and he had absorbed the cost and returned to the calm, and Sera watched all of this happen in the space of a breath and
"The bypass route is viable," he said, and his voice was steady again, the scientist's voice, the voice that held data instead of grief. "My mapping is thorough. Get to the source dimension. Get to the core. I'll guide you."
"And then?"
"And then we stop it."
The portal link flickered — the connection thinning, the way it did when the dimensional membrane shifted and the stabilization had to compensate. Marcus's image wavered. The source-glow in his skin brightened as the link adjusted, and for a moment he was more light than man, more source dimension than human, and Sera's hand reached toward the console as if she could touch him through it.
She couldn't. She had never been able to. He was on the other side of reality, and the portal link was a window she could look through but never open, and her father was glowing with the light of a dimension that was claiming him, and he had just told her he knew how to end the war, and the way he'd said it had left something she couldn't name.
"I'll see you soon," Marcus said. The link steadied. His face resolved — human features over inhuman light, her father's eyes in a stranger's glow. "Get to the source dimension, Sera. I'll be here."
He held her gaze for one more moment. His eyes — fractured with colour, calm with the weight of something decided — held hers across the dimensional gulf. Then the portal link cycled down. The warm light dimmed. The source dimension's illumination faded from the console, replaced by the cold blue-white of the chamber's standard lighting, and Marcus's face thinned to an afterimage and then to nothing, and Sera was alone.
The recycled air tasted flat. The table that had held thirty voices now held silence. Somewhere beyond the sealed door, the station continued — footsteps, the hum of systems that didn't know what had just been said in this room.
Someone has to be the bridge.
The phrase turned in her mind the way her thumb returned to the pendant's chain.
Her pendant was warm against her sternum. Warmer than usual — residual resonance from the portal link, from Marcus's proximity across dimensions, from the crystal's ancient connection to the lineage of people who could feel the boundaries between worlds. The warmth sat against her skin like a coal that wouldn't cool. The pendant had been Elena's gift and Marcus's paired frequency.
All five dragons were quiet.
The silence arrived the way a sound stops — complete, the absence louder than presence. Crimson's restless heat had banked to stillness. Gold's strategic warmth had gone flat. Azure's gentle awareness across her shoulder blades was present but mute. Vexis had stopped analyzing. Nyx — Nyx, who rarely spoke and whose silence was the baseline against which the others' voices registered — Nyx's silence had deepened, as if the void dragon had drawn further into the geometric patterns on Sera's forearm and pulled the darkness in after her.
Five voices. Five constant companions across four books of war. Five intelligences that had offered commentary and counsel and argument through every crisis Sera had faced since the first tattoo opened its eye on her thigh.
Silent. All of them. Together.
Crimson pulsed once — not words, not heat, just presence. A single warm beat against her skin. I'm here.
Sera pressed her palm flat against the console where the portal link had been active moments ago. The surface was cool. The source dimension's warmth had faded with Marcus's image. There was nothing on the console now but metal and circuitry and the faint residual charge of a connection that had closed.
He was never here. He hadn't been here in years. She spoke to him through a window and he spoke back and they called it communication, and it was — it had sustained their relationship across a gulf that should have been impassable — but his hand had never rested on this console. His warmth had never heated this metal. The closest she could get to touching her father was pressing her palm against the place where his voice had been.
She breathed. In, held, out. The technique she'd learned from Azure years ago, when the weight of everything had first threatened to crush her and the water dragon had said breathe with me, child and she had, and it had helped, and she had never stopped.
She straightened. Squared her shoulders. Set her jaw — the gesture that had become reflex, the physical reset that told her body it was time to carry the weight again. She touched her pendant one more time. The crystal pulsed warm under her fingertip, then settled.
She turned toward the door.
Prime was there when it opened. Standing in the corridor, blue channels at a steady warmth, his dark reflective chassis catching the corridor's lighting in long liquid lines. He had given her privacy for the conversation with Marcus. He always did. And he was always here when she came out.
He looked at her. The assessment happened — fast, thorough, the product of years spent learning her tells. Her shoulders, tight. Her jaw, set harder than usual. Her eyes, not meeting his immediately. The pendant, warm enough that he could probably detect the thermal signature from where he stood.
His head tilted left. Concern.
Sera reached for his hand — the same instinct that reached for the pendant when she needed Elena, that reached for Gold when she needed strategy. Prime's fingers closed around hers — warm metal, the gentle pressure of a grip calibrated across years of learning exactly how tightly to hold her.
She didn't tell him what Marcus had said. Not yet. She would — he was the person she thought with, the mind she trusted to find the shape of a problem when her own mind was too close to see it. But not in this corridor, with the station's noise returning around them.
They walked. The corridor stretched ahead of them — functional, industrial, the guts of a repurposed warship that had become the coalition