The broken collar arrived in a padded box with a much less comforting report.
Felix set both on the staging table.
Beside the box lay the script they had expected to use. It was clean, legible and wrong in one very expensive place.
“Read that step,” he said.
The relay operator read it.
A compressed command treated the central returning beat as permission to advance the final handoff. Under the changed path, the beat could arrive with a recognizable pattern and the wrong age. The actual state it described might already have ended.
Across the available channel, Eastern Forge supplied its operator record. Asta had called the difference. Bren had stopped before finishing the acknowledgment. Jian had reduced the successful local transfer, and the prepared isolation had protected the crew.
The collar’s rated element had not survived.
