Dax didn't drop the Chairman. He slowly lowered the trembling executive back to the marble floor, his hands lingering on the ruined lapels of the man's bespoke suit. The silence in the shattered boardroom was heavier than the falling airship had been.
"The Architects," I repeated, the word tasting like ash in my mouth. I stepped away from the ruined mahogany table, my boots crunching on broken crystal. "You intercepted the Deep-Void signal. That wasn't supposed to happen for another three years."
"Time is a relative metric when you're dealing with quantum listening posts," the Chairman gasped, rubbing his throat. He looked at us not with the arrogance of a ruler, but with the hollow, dead-eyed stare of a man who knew the executioner was already walking up the steps. "We caught the echo o
