"I need to talk to the Emperor."
Kira said it the way she'd say "I need to clean the waste recycler." Flat. Necessary. Something that had to be done and wouldn't be pleasant.
Cross looked up from the tactical console. The admiral had been running the Imperial charts against the ship's real-time sensor data, trying to map the inner Expanse's convergence zones with the precision of a woman who preferred problems that could be solved with data. "The long-range comm can reach the fleet's relay network. Aria-7 established the connection protocol during the Drift transit. But Commander, you should know that any communication with the Imperial fleet reveals our position within the Expanse."
"They already know our general position. We flew through their formation twelve hours ago."
"General position and precise coordinates are different things."
"Noted. Open the channel."
Voss came up from the operations space when she heard. She didn't ask permission. She walked into the command space with the Severance schematics on a data tablet and positioned herself within earshot of the Throne's communication array, the forty-year academic who wasn't going to miss a conversation about the engineering specifications she needed, regardless of who that conversation was with.
Aria-7 routed the signal. The ship's communication systems reached through the Expanse's dimensional substrate, the Progenitor comm architecture carrying the signal on frequencies that human technology couldn't match. The connection established in seconds. No lag. No interference. The void substrate carried signals the way water carried sound: faster, cleaner, more directly than the medium the Empire had spent centuries using.
The Emperor's voice came through the Throne's speakers. Clear. Calm. The voice of a man who had been alive for four hundred years and had learned to strip every unnecessary emotion from his speech the way a carpenter strips paint.
"Commander Vance."
"I need the Ascension Platform's complete engineering specifications. Energy system architecture. Channel calibration data. Frequency harmonics. Everything."
A pause. Not long. The Emperor wasn't surprised. He'd given Voss the opening she needed when he'd explained the Platform during their first conversation, and he was smart enough to know that a woman who had spent decades studying dimensional engineering would follow that thread to its end.
"For the Severance weapon," the Emperor said.
"For a modification of the Ascension Platform to function as a focusing array for a dimensional severance operation. Doctor Voss has assessed the Progenitor schematics recovered from the dead vessel. The weapon is viable. The original focusing array is not. The Platform is a potential substitute."
"Potential."
"The calibration data in the Progenitor schematics is sixty-three percent corrupted. We have the design but not all the tuning parameters. Your four hundred years of dimensional engineering research may bridge the gaps."
Another pause. Longer this time. Kira could hear the quality of the silence: not empty, but full. The silence of a man doing calculations in his head, weighing information against four centuries of accumulated knowledge.
"I will transmit the specifications," the Emperor said. "All of them. The Platform's complete engineering package. But you should understand what you are receiving, Commander."
"Explain."
"The Ascension Platform's energy systems were not designed from first principles. Four hundred years ago, when I began the project, I faced the same problem your Doctor Voss faces now: the Progenitor dimensional frequencies that the Throne requires are incompatible with human engineering. Our technology operates on a fundamentally different frequency architecture. Building a machine that could interface with the Throne meant bridging that gap."
Voss was standing very still. The data tablet in her hands had stopped moving.
"I bridged it," the Emperor said, "by studying the only systems that already operated at those frequencies. The void-touched neural architecture."
The Throne room was quiet. The bio-tissue pulsed at its normal rhythm. The ship continued through the Expanse's currents. Everything was exactly as it had been five seconds ago, except that it wasn't.
"The thirty-one void-touched individuals I identified and contained," the Emperor said. "Their neural tissue was the template. The biological pathways through which void energy naturally channels in a human system. I mapped those pathways. Catalogued the frequencies. Identified the resonance patterns. And I replicated them mechanically in the Platform's energy architecture."
Kira's left hand pressed into the Throne's armrest. Not the combat interface. Not the passive connection. Just her hand on the bio-tissue, gripping, the surface warm and responsive under fingers that had gone white at the knuckles.
"You butchered thirty-one people," she said, "and used their nervous systems as a blueprint."
"I studied thirty-one people who were already dead. The containment process was lethal, yes. That was a failure of the early methodology, not the intent. The neural architecture required mapping in its intact state, and the technology to do so non-invasively did not exist four hundred years ago." The Emperor's voice didn't change. Didn't waver. The steady, stripped-clean tone of a man who had made this calculation centuries ago and was not going to pretend it cost him nothing but was also not going to pretend it cost him enough. "The alternative was to wait for better technology while the seal degraded. I chose speed over mercy. I have made that choice many times."
"And you'll make it again."
"If the circumstances require it."
Voss's hand found the wall. She leaned against it. The data tablet hung at her side, the Severance schematics still glowing on its surface, the weapon design that she needed the Platform's specifications to complete. The weapon that would end the Hollow King. Built on data extracted from thirty-one murdered people.
"Transmit the specifications," Kira said. Her voice was level. The level that meant she was operating on discipline, not composure. "All of them."
"Transmitting." A data burst hit the ship's communication systems. Massive. Terabytes of engineering data flowing through the Progenitor comm architecture, the Emperor's four hundred years of research on dimensional energy systems compressed into a single transmission. Aria-7 began processing immediately, the AI's capacity spiking as the data flooded her systems.
"There is one additional matter," the Emperor said.
Kira waited.
"You asked for the records of void-touched individuals. I said I would provide them. I am providing them now, included in this transmission. Complete files on every void-touched person my hunters identified over four centuries."
"How generous."
"The records contain a discrepancy that you will discover when you review them, so I will address it directly. My hunters identified thirty-seven void-touched individuals across the Dominion. Not thirty-one."
Kira's hand stilled on the armrest.
"Thirty-one were contained. Six were not. My hunters tracked them to the Fringe territories, where the trail went cold. The Fringe's lack of infrastructure, combined with the subjects' awareness that they were being hunted, made further pursuit impractical. I reassigned resources to the Platform project and deprioritized the search."
"Six void-touched people," Kira said. "Alive."
"Possibly alive. The oldest identification was nineteen years ago. The most recent was six. People die in the Fringe for many reasons that have nothing to do with the Empire."
"But possibly alive."
"Yes."
Kira did the math. Five pilots for the Severance. Three on the ship: herself, Corvin, Sable. Two short. Six unaccounted void-touched somewhere in the Fringe, if they were still breathing, if they could be found, if they would agree to sit in a Progenitor Throne and channel dimensional energy through their nervous systems to kill a god.
"Where in the Fringe?" she asked.
"The files contain last known locations. Cross will recognize the territories. The information is six to nineteen years old. I would not call it reliable."
"But it's a start."
"It is what I have, Commander." The Emperor paused. "I will hold the fleet at the Expanse boundary as agreed. The Platform remains on standby. If your Doctor Voss determines that the modification is feasible, contact me with the operational requirements and I will have my engineers begin the work."
"Your engineers, working from Progenitor schematics to modify a machine built on the nervous systems of people you killed, to power a weapon designed by a civilization that your Empire claims never existed."
"Yes," the Emperor said. "That is exactly what I am offering."
The channel closed.
---
Voss didn't speak for a long time.
She stood against the wall of the command space with the data tablet pressed against her thigh, the Severance schematics glowing faintly through the screen's edge. The Emperor's Platform specifications were already flowing into the operations space display, Aria-7 sorting and categorizing the data, building the bridge between Progenitor engineering and Imperial technology that would determine whether the weapon was buildable.
"Doctor," Kira said from the Throne.
Voss looked at her. The red-rimmed eyes from six hours of staring at alien schematics now carrying something else. Something that the forty-year academic recognized from her own history: the particular horror of understanding exactly how a piece of technology works and wishing you didn't.
"The neural mapping," Voss said. "The frequency architecture. I've been trying to reverse-engineer the Platform's dimensional interface from the Progenitor specifications. Trying to figure out how the Emperor built a machine that could operate at Progenitor frequencies when human technology can't." She held up the data tablet. "Now I know. He didn't invent the interface. He copied it. From biological systems. From void-touched tissue."
"Can you still work with the specifications?"
Voss flinched. Small. A twitch of the shoulders that she controlled in half a second, the scientist reasserting herself over the human. "Yes. The engineering is sound regardless of its origin. The Platform's frequency architecture is compatible with the Severance requirements. I'll need to cross-reference the Emperor's calibration data with the intact portions of the Progenitor schematics, but the gap I was worried about, the sixty-three percent corruption in the focusing array calculations, it may be bridgeable." She stopped. Swallowed. "He built it well. From what he learned from them. He built it well."
"Voss."
"Give me time, child." The word came out wrong. Voss's voice cracked on it, the old Dominion affectation breaking for a moment, the word "child" that she used for everyone suddenly too close to the thirty-one people who had been someone's children before the Emperor's hunters found them. "Give me time and I'll have answers. Whether the modification works. Whether the weapon is buildable. Whether we can use the devil's engineering to kill the devil's cellmate."
She turned and walked back to the operations space. The data tablet came up. The specifications filled the display. And Voss went to work with the focused, grinding determination of a woman who had decided that the dead deserved to have their stolen knowledge used for something that mattered.
---
Kira sent the crew away.
Not all at once. She gave assignments. Cross and Drayden to review the void-touched files, cross-reference last known locations with current Fringe territory maps. Jax to run a full systems check, prepare the ship for whatever the inner Expanse had waiting. Malik to the weapons bay, dimensional lance calibration, because the closer they got to the seal the more likely they were to encounter void-native organisms and the lance was the only weapon that worked in the Expanse's dimensional environment. Zeph to engineering, working with Corvin on drive stability.
She gave assignments and the crew took them and the command space emptied and Kira was alone in the Throne.
The ship knew.
The bio-tissue around the Throne pulsed warmer. Not the ambient heat of the Expanse environment. A directed warmth. The ancient vessel reading its pilot's neural state through the interface contact, feeling the distress in the signals that Kira's nervous system was broadcasting through her left palm whether she wanted to or not. The ship responding the only way it could: with warmth. With the biological equivalent of a hand on a shoulder.
Kira gave herself thirty seconds.
Her left hand shook against the armrest. Fine tremors. The muscles in her forearm firing without her permission, the physical response to information that her body was processing faster than her mind. Thirty-one people. Neural tissue mapped. Frequency patterns extracted. Bodies studied and catalogued and converted into engineering data. The Platform that they needed to save the galaxy built from the wreckage of lives that the Emperor had classified as acceptable losses four centuries ago.
And she needed the Platform. Needed the specifications. Needed the weapon that it could power. Needed the engineering that came from thirty-one murdered void-touched people because the alternative was sitting in the Void Throne forever, three pilots taking turns dying in a chair while the seal held and the Hollow King screamed behind it.
Her right arm was still numb in its sling. Dead weight from shoulder to fingertips. The combat interface degradation that Sable knew about and that Kira hadn't told the rest of the crew, the countdown that was ticking toward a number she didn't want to calculate.
She was one of them. Void-touched. The same neural architecture. The same frequencies. If the Emperor had found her nineteen years ago, she'd be data in a file, her nervous system stripped and mapped and converted into calibration parameters for a machine.
The thirty seconds ended.
Kira's hand stopped shaking. She pressed her palm flat against the armrest and let the passive interface resume and looked at the sensor display where the Shattered Expanse stretched ahead of them, the dimensional currents carrying the warship deeper, the seal at the center getting closer with every hour.
Six void-touched. Somewhere in the Fringe. Alive or dead. Findable or not.
They needed two more pilots. They had six possibilities. And finding them would mean going back through the Expanse, back through the convergence zones, back through the Imperial fleet, into the Fringe territories where the Emperor's hunters had lost the trail. It would mean spending time they didn't have looking for people who might not exist anymore.
Or it would mean finding another way.
She pulled up the Severance schematics on the Throne's display. Five inputs. Five pilots. Five frequencies in harmonic alignment. The Progenitors had designed it for five because five was the stable configuration, the architecture that repeated at every scale: five ships, five pillars, five positions around the seal.
But the Progenitors had also designed the Throne for five pilots, and one pilot had sat in it alone for three hundred years.
Kira looked at the schematic. At the five input nodes. At the tolerances and margins that Voss was still calculating.
At the question that she wasn't ready to ask yet, but that was forming in the back of her mind the way storm clouds form on a horizon: what happens if three pilots try to do the work of five?
The ship pulsed warm around her.
She got up and went to find Jax, because there was work to do and the work was better than sitting in a chair and thinking about the thirty-one people who would never get up from theirs.
