Chapter 9: The Fellowship Assembles Under Protest

The standoff resolved the way most standoffs did — not through force but through the slow, mutual recognition that neither side could afford the cost of following through. Borrus withdrew his soldiers to the corridor's far end, retained his legal position without pressing it, and made the calculation that Farro, watching him do all of this, understood immediately: the man hadn't come to win the docking bay. He'd come to confirm the Shard was aboard and that its carrier was exactly as described in whatever intelligence brief had sent him here. The seizure order was a probe. The soldiers were theater. Borrus had gotten what he needed before a word was spoken.

Farro watched him go and did not feel relieved.

Gimra came back up the ramp without comment, the particular quality of her silence suggesting that the confrontation had been filed in some internal ledger under a heading Farro didn't yet have access to. Samwell sealed the corridor hatch behind her. In the navigation bay, Gander was already spreading paper charts across the table as though the last forty minutes had been a minor administrative interruption rather than an armed standoff over an artifact capable of remaking spacetime.