Chapter 12: Blood in the Thornwall Corridor

The Thornwall Corridor announced itself the way bad news always did — quietly, then all at once.

Farro had run the outer edge of the Thornwall twice in the early years, back when he was still taking the kind of jobs that paid enough to justify the risk and not enough to justify the insurance. He remembered it as a lane of compressed gravitational eddies and spent ordnance — leftover from a border engagement fifteen years back — that made passive sensors unreliable and active sensors inadvisable. A place where the geometry of space itself was slightly warped, folded over old violence the way scar tissue folded over a wound. Ships moved through it slowly, or ships moved through it once.

He had described this to Gander, who had listened with the patience of a man being told something he already knew in a language slightly different from his own.