The Echelon's Clock
The Sovereign Record dispatch arrived before noon.
Due caught it the way he always caught them, with both hands, reading the seal before the edges went transparent.
His settling gestures stopped immediately. He read the document twice, then a third time, then set it on the table with the care of someone handling something that could change things.
"Echelon notice," Due said, and his collar adjusted once. "Formal."
Alistair walked to the table. Elara came from the supply area. Silas was somewhere in the base, present in the way he was always present, which Alistair had started doing automatically over the past week.
The document was short. It used Echelon standard formatting and institutional language, the kind of words that had been written the same way for decades because the institution that wrote them had been doing it for centuries.
Sun Harvest, recognized as an unregistered faction with demonstrated capability level.
