Chapter 17: What the Sixth Ship's Crew Logged in Their Final Ninety Seconds

The document arrived without ceremony.

That is not a figure of speech, nor an archivist's retrospective characterization imposed upon events whose texture I can only approximate. It is what Amidari recorded, in Volume Twelve, Entry Three, with the particular exactness she reserved for details she did not yet understand and therefore refused to interpret: the sealed data packet was routed through the water-throne's tertiary diplomatic intake channel—not the primary, which the Syndicate's inspection vessels were monitoring, nor the secondary, which Amidari had closed the previous week as a precaution she declined to specify even in her private chronicle—but the tertiary, a channel whose existence was not listed in any publicly accessible record of Nubis's communications architecture and whose operational continuation, eleven years later, I have been unable to verify or refute through any document in my possession. She wrote: it arrived without ceremony. She did not write who had routed it, or how they had known which channel still functioned, or whether the absence of ceremony struck her as careless or deliberate.

I have spent considerable time with that absence. I have not resolved it.