The flagship’s engines went quiet. Its hospital lights stayed on.
Austin walked the lower decks with Sen Rho and a mixed rescue team. Concordat medics guided them to sealed compartments. Local crews brought cutting tools and blankets. No one asked which uniform an injured person wore before opening a door.
They found six workers trapped beside a ruptured coolant line. Sera knew the valve layout and talked the rescuers through the shutdown. When the last worker came free, she sat against the wall and cried from exhaustion.
Austin handed her water. “You did good work.”
“It does not balance what we did at Frost-Belt.”
“No,” he said. “It is not a scale you can reset. Keep doing the next right thing.”
On the bridge, Dara and two Concordat engineers copied the command logs. They found the deleted scout report, the false statement that the cooling plant had been destroyed, and Wu Ji’s order to target the inhabited hub.
The evidence went to the public councils and the Concordat delegates at the same time. Austin did not edit it to make his own side look better. The logs also showed that his defense had caused the relay-platform collapse and twelve injuries.
