Elara stood in the quiet of her private command node, reviewing the flagged anomaly from Mira's latest Cartographer sweep.
No polished briefing. Just raw coordinates and a terse note: "Pre-resonance warning pattern on Veyra-9. Recommend field verification without full lattice."
She approved the team in under two minutes. Decentralization wasn't theory anymore. It was the only way to test whether Vale's ideas could hold when things got ugly.
Mara took point. She picked the roster herself: Kael for the next-gen angle, Mira Solen in the flesh because holo-projections hid too much, and Aiden from the Unmapped Accord for his engineering background.
Sabrina fed them logistics from R-17. Harlan slipped them rim-side intel on the station's crew patterns. No heavy resonance escort. The point was to operate lean.
The shuttle docked at Veyra-9's main bay under harsh relay lights. The station smelled of recycled air and hot metal.
