Haris stared at him, then at the viewscreen. “The… the enemy flagship is destroyed, sir. We lost secondary power, but the debris screen held. How did you—sir, you couldn’t have known about that debris field. It wasn’t on any sensor sweep.”
He saw everything . The Indomitable ’s own failing shield generator. The escape pod that would be crushed in twelve seconds if he did nothing. The trajectory of a single piece of shrapnel from the destroyed frigate that would, in nine minutes, pierce the visor of a marine named Orisi on the hangar deck. navarch ability cooldown 17.6 seconds degree 100
But that was a problem for another . For now, he was the Navarch. And the Navarch’s work was never done. Haris stared at him, then at the viewscreen
In those seconds, he was blind. Not metaphorically. His optic nerves would short-circuit from the feedback. His auditory cortex would interpret the screams of his crew as music—old, broken waltzes from a childhood he no longer remembered. His skin would feel the phantom touch of a thousand needles. He could neither speak nor move. He was a statue of meat and lightning, frozen while the universe kept spinning. How did you—sir, you couldn’t have known about