The Navarch ’s interface pulsed a soft amber in the periphery of Kaelen’s vision. . The number was a heartbeat, a metronome, a death sentence counting backward.
He was falling through a void made of sound. A child’s lullaby twisted into a dirge. His mother’s voice, but speaking Synthari binary. He tried to scream, but his lungs were full of static. The needles came—ten thousand of them, sewing his eyelids shut, stitching his lips together, threading his nerves into a knot of pure agony.
He didn’t tell them that degree one hundred hadn’t just shown him the battle. It had shown him the next three. It had shown him the face of the man who would betray him, six months from now, on a space station called Meridian. It had shown him the exact date of his own death. navarch ability cooldown 17.6 seconds degree 100
“Degree one-zero-zero,” he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. The command was locked. Not ninety-five degrees of tactical focus, not ninety-nine. . Total, absolute, catastrophic immersion.
He gripped the edge of the operations table, his knuckles white. The bridge of the Indomitable was a wreck—sparking consoles, the acrid smell of burnt coolant, and the bodies of three officers who had been standing exactly where he was now, thirty seconds ago. The enemy, a rogue swarm-fleet of the Synthari Collective, had learned. They always learned. The Navarch ’s interface pulsed a soft amber
He reached out with his will and commanded the Synthari dreadnought’s reactor to yawn open at the weld seam. He commanded the Indomitable ’s remaining point-defense cannons to fire not at the incoming missiles, but at a specific cloud of debris that would, in three seconds, form a perfect kinetic shield. He commanded the enemy admiral’s left hand to spasm on his command console, initiating an emergency purge of their forward weapon banks.
He had one second. He couldn’t save everyone. A Navarch who tried to save everyone saved no one. He was falling through a void made of sound
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.