A month can be an eternity. It was long enough for the screams from Detention Cell 7 to fade from the capital’s news feeds, replaced by terse official communiques. It was long enough for Arthur Vance’s name to be scrubbed from the fleet registries, his existence redacted to a footnote in a classified treason file. It was long enough for the slow, agonizing process of his erasure on Hadrien VI to begin, a living ghost haunted by the memory of a sun he would never see again.
For me, it was a month of silence.
The silence was louder than the screams had been. It filled the sprawling commander’s quarters assigned to me in the Apex Spire, a space so vast and sterile it felt like a mausoleum. I would stand for hours at the floor-to-ceiling transparisteel window, watching the city-planet’s traf
