They emerged into a briefing room large enough to hold all forty first-year cadets. Rows of seats faced a central podium and a large display screen. The room was clean but worn—the kind of space that had hosted thousands of briefings, each one preparing crews for missions that some of them wouldn't survive.
Officers filed in and took positions along the walls. Captains, commanders, lieutenants—all of them wearing the same tired competence Isabella had seen in the crew. All of them watching the cadets with expressions that ranged from sympathy to grim amusement.
Then Admiral Darius Hollway entered, and the room went silent.
He was sixty-one, according to the service record Isabella had read during her research on TSD leadership. Tall, broad-shouldered, with steel-grey hair cut to regulat
