Chapter 1: The War Council

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…