The first thing Noah did when the Vel'ai council said yes was nothing.
He stood in that room for exactly three seconds and let the weight of what had just been agreed to settle into something real. Four hundred million people. Seventeen colonies spread across a planet he had been on for less than twelve hours. A governing body that had just transmitted an authorization across their entire world telling their people to trust the humans that were already standing in their cities.
Three seconds.
Then he started moving.
The ground teams had been in position for hours. Sixteen teams across sixteen locations, Eclipse members and task force personnel and Ares soldiers who had volunteered and whose king had not stopped them, sitting in shadows and rooftops and the gaps between structures waiting for exactly this signal. The moment the Vel'ai transmission went out across the planet's comm network, every team leader received the same message through their earpiece simultaneously.
