IMPERIAL PALACE - THE EMPEROR'S PRIVATE STUDY - 11:02 PM
The transition from a peaceful retrospective to a state of total military mobilization took exactly 1.4 seconds.
Orion had been mid-sentence, looking out over the twinkling lights of Earth's twelve billion lives, when his perception of reality—honed by eighteen mastered concepts—felt a violent, jagged tear at the extreme edge of the solar system. To his human senses, it was like a sudden, sickening drop in atmospheric pressure; to his Space and Energy concepts, it was a screaming dissonance. A dimensional breach.
He stood up, his chair sliding back across the polished obsidian floor with a sharp rasp. "Rene?"
"Detected," she replied. Her voice, usually warm and simulated to carry the nuances of a trusted advisor, had flattened into a crystalline tone of pure processing efficiency.
